As I uploaded my morning photographs to Flickr, I checked out some of the images of my contacts and came across the one on the left (by rosefirerising and used with this Creative Commons License - click image for original) regarding drones and their usage. Wherever you stand on the issue, if even you have a stand on the issue, it's worth looking at what they've done with open data. Clearly they have a perspective that the interpretation of the data supports a certain perspective regarding drone strikes - the site is worth looking at - but even if you disagree with the data presented, you have to respect what was done with the data. It's dynamic, contextual and as such is informative.
I bring this up because a friend of mine, Rick Davis, was heavily involved in Haiti after the earthquake. I might get this wrong as far as what Rick told me, but in 36 seconds 287,000 people died. In discussing it last night, the problem of getting that across to people who might have known a few people who died over the course of their lives simply can't conceive of that many people dead in less than a minute. When I saw the data this morning regarding drone strikes, I began thinking of how Haiti's context could be put into something similar before, during and after the earthquake. Of course, disaster related agencies have data on such things and as of yet I haven't taken the trouble to research that data - but it doesn't mean that the data is open. In the context of NGOs and the lack of transparency associated with many of them, as well as their effectivity on the ground, some NGOs wouldn't want such data to be open - particularly regarding the aftermath.
In the context of the South East Asian tsunami, where I did my part from afar as did many others, that context is also something worth noting.
The trouble with data is that it is quite easily bent to the will of the person using it. But if the data is transparent, peer review is possible and multiple analyses would help weed out the convenient analyses pretty quickly. Applied to any sort of a problem, this is powerful and is, once the politics is weeded out, allows for informed discussion.
The trouble, as always, is finding trustworthy sources. The more apparent trouble in this day and age revolves around privacy - not that it seems to matter to people until they lose it in a way meaningful to themselves - as well choosing effective use of open data.
