Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Digital Fuel of the 21st Century: Innovation through Open Data and the Network Effect

Vivek Kundra; Salesforce.com, Harvard Kennedy School, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Fall 2011

From the report: "In the information economy, data is power and we face a choice between democratizing it and holding on to it for an asymmetrical advantage…. If this data isn't sliced, diced and cubed to separate signal from noise, it can be useless. But, when made available to the public and combined with the network effect—defined by Reed's Law,4 which asserts that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network—society has the potential to drive massive social, political and economic change…. In today's world, open data leveraged by networks is the fuel that powers important decisions at each level of society—from government, to business, to community, to households—but it is also a product of our every activity at every level of our existence."  Read more