For the most part, data has a price. Whether it is a survey crew using GPS to gather geographic information or a Stand survey crew with clipboards to collect responses, data has a price. It costs money to prepare to gather it, to gather it, to process it, to analyze it, to report on it and finally to present it. The price tag is always there. I have to admit, there have been several times where I have questioned the price of a dataset. One in particular was one of the food economy reports that the Ochs Center produced. In the moment, I only looked at the price and wondered why we wouldn't just use that money to *do something*. Now, I have no doubt that things like the Benwood Foundation's Gaining Ground project/initiative might not exist had the Ochs Center not done those studies and reports. At the time, I was unable to see the value in the work.
Value is something latent in data. It is not until people use the data to *do something* that value starts to emerge. The exciting thing, for some datasets, is that we have no idea what great ideas people are going to come up with to put them to use. Governments can open data, but it takes developers, organizations, and individuals to transform a dataset into something valuable. Something informative. Something formative.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment