On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 2:58 AM, Nathan Torkington <[email protected]> wrote: > On 8/02/2010, at 8:44 AM, P Kishor wrote: >> >> This is a brilliant post Nat. Thanks for sharing your insight. I do >> want to add a caveat to this -- I hope this post is not taken as ammo for >> *not* working toward open data. > > Yes, I spoke for over an hour to the journalist from the Economist, but this > is what came out: > http://www.economist.com/world/international/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15469415 > >> But whatever governments do, the presentation of endless facts can fall >> flat unless there are independent developers who know what to do with them. >> As Mr Torkington admits, failing to grasp this point led to disappointing >> results in New Zealand. In his enthusiasm for technology, he failed to think >> much about who would use the data he was posting, and why. A wad of facts >> was dumped in cyberspace, with no instructions or incentives to find good >> ways of using them. There they sit, unread by any machine. Even the geekiest >> types can be nonplussed when they are presented with data but no purpose. >> > I didn't think I said that the NZ results were disappointing. We built a > data store where all the prices are zero, now we have to tell people that it > exists--we've succeeded in opening data, now we have to help people make it > useful (and build feedback loops so we release the data that people want). > I suspect the need for a lyrical ending twisted my words into the shape > they finally took. >
Reminds me of the journalist who saw Bill Gates' dog swimming. Next day's headlines scream, "Bill Gates' dog can't walk on water!" -- Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is science ======================================================================= Sent from Madison, Wisconsin, United States _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
