Hi All, I've just posted up a new piece (with hand-drawn diagrams!) on the Foundation's blog about building the Open Data Ecosystem:
<http://blog.okfn.org/2011/03/31/building-the-open-data-ecosystem/> I've included the first few paragraphs of the piece below. I'd be very interested in any feedback or thoughts people had! Regards, Rufus ## The Present: A One-Way Street At the current time, the basic model for data processing is a “one way street”. Sources of data, such as government, publish data out into the world, where, (if we are lucky) it is processed by intermediaries such as app creators or analysts, before finally being consumed by end users1. It is a one way street because there is no feedback loop, no sharing of data back to publishers and no sharing between intermediaries. So what should be different? ## The Future: An Ecosystem What we should have is an ecosystem. In an ecosystem there are data cycles: infomediaries — intermediate consumers of data such as builders of apps and data wranglers — should also be publishers who share back their cleaned / integrated / packaged data into the ecosystem in a reusable way — these cleaned and integrated datasets being, of course, often more valuable than the original source. In addition, corrected data, or relevant “patches” should find their way back to data producers so data quality improves at the source. Finally, end users of data need not be passive consumers but should be also be able to contribute back — flagging errors, or submitting corrections themselves. With the introduction of data cycles we have a real ecosystem not a one way street and this ecosystem thrives on collaboration, componentization and open data. [.... more at <http://blog.okfn.org/2011/03/31/building-the-open-data-ecosystem/>] _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
