http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/truly-o...

"Truly Open Data"
by Nat Torkington




Open source discourages laziness (because everyone can see the corners
you've cut), it can get bugs fixed or at least identified much faster
(many eyes), it promotes collaboration, and it's a great training
ground for skills development. I see no reason why open data shouldn't
bring the same opportunities to data projects.

And a lot of data projects need these things. From talking to
government folks and scientists, it's become obvious that serious
problems exist in some datasets. Sometimes corners were cut in
gathering the data, or there's a poor chain of provenance for the data
so it's impossible to figure out what's trustworthy and what's not.
Sometimes the dataset is delivered as a tarball, then immediately
forks as all the users add their new records to their own copy and
don't share the additions. Sometimes the dataset is delivered as a
tarball but nobody has provided a way for users to collaborate even if
they want to.

So lately I've been asking myself: What if we applied the best
thinking and practices from open source to open data? What if we ran
an open data project like an open source project? What would this look
like?




Full blog at:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/truly-o...