In many respects I agreed with the original comment you replied to, but something didn't quite sit right. I read the comment and thought that the commenter was obviously much more qualified to speak to the subject than I was, but I just felt that while he wasn't wrong, he wasn't completely right. You hit it right on the head.
Working in a Fortune 500 company it is amazing the kind of information we have available for "Powerful People". I also feel like more and more of that information is available to everyone, the difference is that "Powerful People" have the money and resources to pay teams to sift through, organize, and present the information in an actionable way. Companies, Powerful People, and Governments spend tons of resources on trying to understand the information. Data is cheap, understanding the data is extremely expensive.
Information is out there for the taking, but it is useless in the raw state it starts in.
I read an interesting story a few weeks ago about how the CIA has entire teams of cartographers whose job is to show data on information on maps in a way that tells a story. That is their full time job to work with researchers and analysts to create "pretty" representations of data that are informative and easy to digest.
I think data is only interesting because of the stories it tells. But picking a story out data can be time consuming and expensive and prone to errors. If WikiTribune enables experts and laypeople to collaborate in a productive way then I think it will be an amazing service.
I have lots of thoughts on all of this and am very very very interested to see where it goes. I really hope this is as great as it has the potential to be.
Working in a Fortune 500 company it is amazing the kind of information we have available for "Powerful People". I also feel like more and more of that information is available to everyone, the difference is that "Powerful People" have the money and resources to pay teams to sift through, organize, and present the information in an actionable way. Companies, Powerful People, and Governments spend tons of resources on trying to understand the information. Data is cheap, understanding the data is extremely expensive.
Information is out there for the taking, but it is useless in the raw state it starts in.
I read an interesting story a few weeks ago about how the CIA has entire teams of cartographers whose job is to show data on information on maps in a way that tells a story. That is their full time job to work with researchers and analysts to create "pretty" representations of data that are informative and easy to digest.
I think data is only interesting because of the stories it tells. But picking a story out data can be time consuming and expensive and prone to errors. If WikiTribune enables experts and laypeople to collaborate in a productive way then I think it will be an amazing service.
I have lots of thoughts on all of this and am very very very interested to see where it goes. I really hope this is as great as it has the potential to be.