I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else.
Crowdsourced data visualisations are more useful for the public sector
Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy journalists and political parties have in describing the problems that elected representatives are expected to solve.
The rubbish-in-rubbish-out problem. They are, therefore an opportunity to involve more of us in a constructive way in policy making.
According to Public Technology, this is a bigger opportunity than I realised because public sector managers use data visualisations more than the private sector do.
Secondly, Alison Benjamin has a good roundup of the problems that a reliance upon social entrepreneurs and active citizens can bring in the provision of local services.
“…if you live in a neighbourhood where concerned, educated, articulate residents with time on their hands will rise to the challenge. Leaving the fate of, say, the local library in their hands may not be such a bad idea. But what about areas where decades of joblessness and drugs and benefit dependency may have robbed residents of any glimmer of a can-do culture? Here, doesn’t the state have a moral duty to provide a library service where pensioners can read the paper, where schoolchildren can do their homework in peace and discover a world of books not available at home, and where the digitally excluded are able to participate in the wonders of the internet?
If library provision were left to local volunteers, or social enterprises – those not-for-profit organisations run by entrepreneurs much-feted by the cheerleaders of this new settlement – what of the postcode lottery that would no doubt result?”
She’s very restrained. If I’d have been there and got the glib ‘so what’ response that she received, I would have left the room only to return shortly with a flamethrower.
Thirdly, there’s Dave Briggs post on Google Buzz – the reviews I’ve seen are mixed. One side of the argument from Google Reader addicts who carefully select who sends them recommendations is that all of a sudden a tool that was working beautifully is suddenly chucking loads of unrequested information at me.
The other side of the argument is that it will being an awful lot more people into the day-to-day activity of sharing and collaborative authoring of content. This can only be a good thing for everyone, surely?
