Stepping into the Commons

I have this bee in my bonnet. I love the idea of getting our tightly held interesting data into the wild. I want to let the people have access to our data to keep us transparent, hold us to task, mash up the info, share cool things.

So I go to my managers and I say “I want to put some open datasets on our new website” and the say “hunh? Who would want to use our data and why would they want to use it?” Tim Berners-Lee displays in this video some of the awesomeness that can come from mashups of open data.

I find this all very exciting…. but I am now also tempered into wondering what ill effects there could be for sharing all this information. The posts and subsequent comments on Michael Gurstein’s blog have a balancing effect on the initial thrill of the ideas of the good that could be done. Certainly I still believe that open data is the way of the future but if we are going to take on board any of the suggestions of Gruen’s Government 2.0 Taskforce then we also need to consider the risks involved.