Earlier this summer, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Future of News and Civic Media conference at MIT. It was great to be around such a creative and talented group of people, and as usual, this year brought with it a new batch of Knight News Challenge winners. (For a roundup of some conference takeaways, see Paul’s post).
The topic for my talk was “Data into Action” — in other words, how can we build on transparency and use data to create social and political impact?
This was the question posed by Chris Csikszentmihalyi, the director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, and the host of the conference. It’s a particularly relevant question now, because the past few years have seen a real explosion in public open data, including countless websites and apps that make use of it. Built into Chris’ question is the assertion that perhaps we don’t fully know how best to make use of all of this data that’s becoming available to us.
My guess is that we are going see a big increase in the number of tools that make public data actionable. Below is my initial take on how (you can also see the video and the slides from the conference). This is admittedly not fully formed: I don’t claim to know how to “turn data into action” — rather, I just have a few ideas about some of the factors and how they’re shaping the “data into action” landscape.
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