On Wednesday Ministry of Finance arranged an open "hackathon" (F) for developing a country plan in order to join Open Government Partnership along with 70 other countries.
Open government, Open knowledge, Open data..
Opening data has been on agenda for a year now. Short-sightedly, I have settled for aiming to opening up government spending.
Last week I came across with broader views that obviously had been there for me to find. With a colleague from Isle of Man we discussed how to find and visualize the influence behind faceless enterprises. How to spot the power links in the world economy and what exactly is the thing that needs to be opened if we aim to find the real places of influence?
Customer journeys in one's own mother tongue
Data visualization came up in Visualizing Knowledge (F) seminar on Monday. Rob Waller linked literacy built on structured documents with the concept of customer journey.
On Thursday I got a sort of a wake up call on the real significance of mother tongue. I got acquainted with contract visualization already on Monday, in English. But it wasn't until M!ND researcher Stefania Passera gave the same speech in Finnish, my own mother tongue, that really got my own thinking going.
As the pieces gained their familiarity in Finnish I became able to apply the newly learned methods in the phenomena in my own work.
So this is what it means to really understand what the official actually wants of me!
Open data is not knowledge, interpretation creates understanding
In the end we got taught by a living legend. Hans Rosling so knows how to visualize "boring" data, how to interpret it and how to communicate the phenomena lurking behind millions of rows of raw data. If Bush can get it, so can you, he concluded :)
Opening data, knowledge and government means more.
Openness is the way to sustainability.
