Open data in The Economist

2010 Feb 05 14:37 NZDT

I spent an hour on the phone to a reporter from The Economist two
nights ago, and his piece is online:
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15469415

When I talked to him, I recapped the thoughts I'd been having about
the catalogue and users (namely, you need both).  I said everyone did
catalogues but nobody was working on communities yet.  I'm afraid that
the nuances of my analysis didn't make it into print :(

Here's what I sent the reporter this morning:

> I must have been imprecise on the phone.  I winced when I read
> "admits", "failing", and "disappointing", which could give a
> negative picture of what is still a positive situation (the
> catalogue is being used, it's a necessary step to bringing in users
> of the data, more people in the NZ government are talking and
> thinking about openness now than they were before we did it).  I
> look at it as a process: rather than "we did one thing, we haven't
> achieved a revolution, therefore it's a failure", I see "we did one
> thing and got closer, it's shown the next thing we need to do,
> there's no such thing as /the end/ but we are getting closer with
> each step".

I hope that when people read this in the print edition, they don't
think that cat.open.org.nz and data.govt.nz and the like are
failures.  They're not.  I hope they take away that we're in the thick
of things.

Anyway, I wanted you to know that I don't think of what we've done as
disappointing or failing.  I'm bloody proud of what we've got, and
can't wait to build our numbers.  This year is going to be even more
awesome than last.  And last year we got the government to build a
needed tool to promote open data, and they built it on open source,
and have continued to develop it -- shit, 2009 was an awesome year!

I guess it's good to learn that even The Economist doesn't get it 100%
right all the time.  (And that we can't expect every article to be as
hagiographic as Idealogue's :-)