Peter Deitz – Becoming Visible 2011 – Data

Peter Deitz is a social entrepreneur, micro-finance advocate and the Managing editor of SocialFinance.ca.  He has taken on the pioneering task of reporting and distributing information and news on the emerging social finance/social enterprise field in Canada.  Have a look at the impressive array of writers, commentators, bloggers and essayists he has already assembled!  Here is Peter's response   What would you like to become more visible in 2011?   You can also Download Becoming Visible  -  the complete collection of 58 essays.   

Data

In 2011, I'd like to see Data become more visible. Data has a reputation for being boring. In reality, it's anything but. Data, when shared in a format that anyone (or any machine) can analyze, reveals everything from injustice to interconnectedness and serves as the renewable energy for driving a socially and environmentally innovative agenda.
 
Our challenge is that Data has a history of being guarded too closely by institutions, either intentionally or because they lack another model. I'd like to see incentives created for institutions to share data that should be public as freely as individuals on social network sites share data that probably shouldn't be public!
 
And then Iʼd like to see the combined data repositories of institutions and individuals linked up in ways that a few years ago we wouldn't have thought possible. This is the work I'm committing myself to in 2011. Linked open data across multiple sectors: the financial sector, the philanthropic sector, and media. What will come from more open and linked data? We don't entirely know. But that's what makes living in the first half of the 21st century so exciting.

NOTES:

See my blog series: Is the Internet Our New Parliament Buildings?

You can download the complete collection of Becoming Visible responses here: Download Becoming Visible.  Or by clicking the Becoming Visible Category on the right hand side of your screen.

Please share and distribute to your friends and through your various networks, websites etc.  I think you will agree – these are too good to keep to ourselves.