Data That Talks

Parke Wilde raised an important issue on his U.S. Food Policy blog last week: As public data becomes more accessible, we should focus on ways to pull together disparate bodies of data.

Parke explains how he used data from the Environment Working Group and CSPAN to show overlap of federal farm aid and campaign contributions.

The challenge, as Bill Allison put it on the Sunlight Foundation blog (where I found Parke’s post), is that “these disparate sets of data don't talk to one another.”

Dan Gillmor and his Berkeley class seem to be focusing on this problem. Their project in California’s 11^th Congressional district seems designed to pull together public resources (including data, I assume) to make it easier for citizen journalists to cover the race.

Opening up data the way folks at the EWG, CSPAN and many others are doing, makes it possible for masses of curious citizens to poke around and expose government rottenness. 

But to really get the masses poking around, the data needs to be highly accessible. One part of that is being able to pull together similar, separate bodies of information