The idea of spatial data as the lifeblood is interesting. As someone said at the Gov 2.0 publicsphere event, ‘There’s something about maps…’ People love them. Apart from the fact that there’s comfort in orientation, the something is also that a map lets you use your eyes to think, which is an easy, aesthetic experience relative to reading a list of instructions (or an XML file!). And to discover valuable information you can’t otherwise see in real-life.

Kevin’s point is great, that a lot of data collected beyond government has a high public interest.

Of course, there is also a lot of data that we wouldn’t immediately cast as geospatial, or associate with spatial discovery. Eg, some people could see no value in mapping World War I service records before Mapping our Anzacs was built. It takes an even greater imaginative leap to appreciate (before they exist) the value of ‘maps’ that do not reference real-world space, such as those developed in Mitchell Whitelaw’s Visible Archive project. As well as being beautiful artefacts, his visualisations reveal inherent structures in national archives data, and facilitate new discoveries. Timelines, FOAF-based displays and so on can also serve this purpose.

So, there are many ways to bring data to life. Rather than finding the juice in geospatial in particular, I’d say it’s in all kinds of projects that create an interface to structured data and engage people in discovering new information and relationships.

It’s a compelling, wide open road ahead.

While government 2.0 is a necessary step we could be thinking along the lines of community 2.0. That is, what is good for government in terms of opening up access to information could also apply to other organisations – particularly our large “public” companies. A company like Woolworths has a wealth of data about shopping habits of each of us. As a minimum I should be able to get an electronic record of all my purchases and I should be able to do what I like with that information. A company like BHP has a wealth of data about the continent of Australia. As a good corporate citizen information it holds about “underground” Australia could be released to others to the benefit of all.

If we start to look at things this way then perhaps there is a quid pro quo that can operate. An individual social agent be it a person, cooperative, company, trust etc. could be allowed to access government data – but only if they were prepared to release releasable data collected by their own organisation. That is, data held by organisations and individuals if it causes no damage to the entity should be released to the rest of the community.

Now I know this is a distraction from the main thrust of government 2.0 but if we have this in the back of our minds when constructing and implementing gov 2.0 then we might make community 2.0 easier to accomplish.

A critical part of the interaction between entities is the concept of trust. Our social organisations work much better when we have measures of trust and in a modern society we have to go beyond our social networks and knowing who we can trust and “industrialising” trust. We use social controls to keep EBay participants trustworthy and Wikipedia trustworthy. We need the same mechanisms with government data. This depends on identification of the agents who created the data and the trust we have in them. This becomes doubly important when people and organisations outside the government contribute to government data.