Session Idea: What good does making data open really do?

[Elizabeth Corley]

How do you communicate the value of open data when you cannot specify what will actually be done with it? The Guardian provides an interesting example of showing a project as it unfolds at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine

Below are some interesting things Development Seed has done sent to me by Bonnie Bogle.

On a project with NDI, we built a site to show polling data from the recent election in Afghanistan. We put this on a map and overlaid it with other data like security threat levels, which helped show where fraud
took place: http://afghanistanelectiondata.org/data.

 

Two other examples of open data in use are two projects we worked on with the New America Foundation. One shows data on all public school districts in the US with 65 different data indicators: http://febp.newamerica.net/. The other
is a data browser that maps and charts health indicators in all 50 states with
data over the past 30 years: http://statehealth.newamerica.net/.