Democratizing Data, and Other Notes from the Open Source Convention

There has been enormous talk over the past few years of open data and what it can do for society, but proponents have largely come to admit: data is not democratizing in itself. This topic is hotly debated, and a nice summary of the viewpoints is available in this PDF containing articles by noted experts. At the Open Source convention last week, I thought a lot about the democratizing potential of data and how it could be realized.

Who benefits from data sets

At a high level, large businesses and other well-funded organizations have three natural advantages over the general public in the exploitation of data sets:

• The resources to gather the data
• The resources to do the necessary programming to crunch and interpret the data
• The resources to act on the results

These advantages will probably always exist, but data can be useful to the public too. We have some tricks that can compensate for each of the large institutions’ advantages...