Knowing more about where our data comes from is an important practice, since it helps us understand the consequences and nature of how businesses and government agencies get their information. But how many people really care about open-data access?
A recent Pew Research survey asked a select group of Americans what they thought about government-based data initiatives. While 65 percent of Americans use the internet to find out information about government entities (such as searching out park hours or when their license needs to be renewed), only 5 percent think that the government is doing a good job of sharing such data, and only 39 percent think that the government is doing a "somewhat effective" job.
Why is there this contrast? It appears that Americans have a different understanding of what open data is than what it actually is. "Open data is when Health and Human Services opens up the data about infection rates at hospitals, so when I type in a hospital in a search engine, I can not only see which is closest to me, but which one has the lowest rate of infection," Beth Simone Noveck, an NYU professor who manages the Governance Lab, a project dedicated to strengthening government open data projects, told USA Today.
Open data has been available for a long time, but what kind of data do consumers want to see? "Eighty-two percent of adults said they were comfortable with the government sharing online data about the sanitation and safety records of restaurants, 62% were OK with the sharing of information about individuals' criminal records and 60% accepted online posting of the performance of individual teachers," reports USA Today.
