0-Nan

Not everyday you get the opportunity to attend an event at Cabinet Office. Moreover, not everyday they’re inviting you to an event you actually care about. Hence, here I am at 22 Whitehall for a discussion about the Open Data Consultation with their Transparency Team.

The people attending this kind of events usually belong to the following tribes:

• developers want data to be released as quick as possible and have in mind possible applications/visualisations/uses of the data; tend not to care much about the legal implications
• openness campaigners push for data to be released no matter whether they can be useful or not; their only concern is transparency (“you’ve got nothing to hide, right?”)
• privacy campaigners are not necessarily against data release, but are over-worried about big-brotheresque implications (where Big Brother is in this case your car insurer, rather than the Government)
• policymakers which is a cool description of the average Civil Servant involved in this: they support data to be released with moderation, and are usually worried. And they don’t know about what.

Such a diverse gathering incurs easily in the risk of over-generalising the discussion, which is technically what has happened. However, I guess this was exactly the goal of the Cabinet Office Transparency Team: see how these different people tend to perceive the Open Data issue, and what common grounds can be found. Necessarily, such common grounds are generalistic and tend to involve a discussion about fears, hopes, effects of data releases, and what they want from each other.

The workshops was pretty much interactive and helped each person interact with others and get in contact with, sometimes, a completely different point of view. Evidently there are many hopes about Open Data: that it can be better, quicker, machine readable, and most importantly linked. Many people attending the workshop also stressed they would like the process of data release to be more transparent. Also some fears were made explicit, especially about the possibility of low-quality, meaningless, data being released.

I think, however, that the two most important points made in this respect were

• sustainability of the data infrastructure: we don’t want Open Data to be released and go offline the day after because the server is engulfed by excessive demand; sustainability also in the sense that we want the agency releasing the data defining a process for updating the data.
• engagement: the agency releasing Open Data needs to set up a way to interact with developers and campaigners to respond to their queries about the data released, and possibly some kind of “customer service” structure.

I strongly believe these two points to be the key to make the Open Data movement successful and I was frankly surprised of hearing someone dismissing them as “we just want the data”. Although I agree that some data is better than no data, we shouldn’t be driving the system to the frustrating situation in which we can’t affect the Open Data release process because such process hasn’t been defined properly. Moreover, although sometimes low-quality data is acceptable if there’s no alternative, I wouldn’t push the agencies to release data whose quality hasn’t been assessed: we don’t want to drive the whole quality down.

I fully understand that in the view of the Government and of some campaigners Open Data release can be a way to deal with Freedom Of Information requests in a more automatic way, and this surely means that data must be released as and when available. However, we have a historical chance to define the way data should be made public and what kind of added value we expect from them. This is an opportunity not to be missed.

Some interesting points were made when discussing what to expect from the Government and from the other actors. For example, the idea of re-sharing seems to be finally part of the common culture of data: most users are ready to be both users and consumers of open data, and push for everyone to make their data available. These data can be, in turn, derivative data from the original agency: a process that can enrich and empower the final users.

I do not particularly agree with those saying that Government should set the data release and step out of the game: I think that there is a need for a central assessment of the quality of data in order to avoid “crap data” to become mainstream and I can’t see many alternatives to a central agency, as Ofcom is for communications or Ofsted for education. What the Government needs to do is to make such procedures simple, to help other actors to release Open Data with an easy legislation, and to extend access to procurement for SMEs who currently struggle to satisfy the financial requirements even though they might offer better services than bigger companies. I believe that the Government should maintain its regulatory powers in this context in order to make data more relevant, accessible, democratic, genuinely open.

There is some concern about privacy, of course. One of the main point is that once you start releasing data you don’t know how these will be used and by who. Worringly, data don’t need to be directly referring to a person to identify them. Identification is not a binary function. The classical example is how a car insurance company (yes, I pick on them easily!) can alter its prices after analysing crime rates data. This is something they couldn’t do before. In a way, where I live now identifies me strongly than before, and the car insurer can amend their behaviour towards me because of Open Data although they don’t have perfectly identifiable information about me.

Should this prevent crime data to be released? I don’t think so. I would rather call for more regulations and for punishing this kind of behaviour, but I also think this concern shouldn’t be part of the Open Data movement: we only need to care about transparency and, in my case, efficiency of the systems that will be used to release the data. Concerns about privacy need to be addressed, but abuse of data is a widespread problem that does not affect only the Open Data context, so it should be tackled by another, more general, task-force.

I will be commenting about the points of the Open Data Consultation in a following post. For the time being, I would recommend reading what Chris Taggart has written about his response to the ODC.

[Disclaimer: this post represents my own view and not that of my employer. As if you didn't know that already.]

Do the words “mobile portal” appeal to you?

I have been working extensively, with a small team, to launch St. George’s University of London‘s mobile portal since last January after we decided to go down the road of a web portal rather than that of a mobile app. The reason for this choice is pretty clear: despite the big, and growing, success of mobile apps, we didn’t want to be locked in to a given platform or to waste resources on developing for more platform. Being a small institution it’s very difficult to get resources to develop on one platform, even less on multiple ones. We also wanted to reach more and more users, and a mobile portal based on open, accessible, resources made perfect sense.

As many of the London-based academic institutions, St. George’s needs to account for two different driving forces: the first is that as an internationally renowned institution it needs to approach students and researchers all over the world; the second is that being based in a popular borough it is part of the local community for which it needs to become a reference point, especially in times of crisis. Being a medical school, based in a hospital and a quality NHS health care structure, emphasizes a lot the local appeal of this institution.

This idea of St. George’s as an important local institution was one of the main drives behind our mobile portal development. We surely wanted to provide a good, alternative, service to our staff and students, by letting them access IT services when on the move. However, the idea of reaching out to people living and working around us, to get St George’s better known and integrated within its own local community, lead us to a thriving experience developing and deploying this portal. “Can we provide the people living in Tooting, Wandsworth, and even London, with communication tools to meet their needs, while developing them for people within our institution?” we asked ourselves. “Can we help people find more about their local community, give them ideas for places to go, or show them how to access local services?“.

This coalition government had among its flagship policy that of a “Big Society”, having the aim “to create a climate that empowers local people and communities”. Surely a controversial topic, nonetheless helpful to rediscover a local role for institutions like us to get them back in touch with their own local community, which in some case they had completely forgotten.

In any London borough there are hospitals, universities, schools, societies, authorities. No matter their political affiliation, if each of these could do something, they would improve massively the lives of the people living within their boundaries. Can IT be part of this idea? I think so. I believe that communication in this century can and does improve quality of life. If I can now just load my mobile portal and check for train and tube times, that will help me get home earlier and spend more time with my family. If I can look up the local shops, it will make my choices more informed. It might get me to know more local opportunities, and ultimately to get me in touch with people.

Developing this kind of service doesn’t come with no effort. It required work and technical resources. We thought that if we could do this within the boundaries of something useful to our internal users, that effort would be justified, especially if we tried to contain the costs. With this view in mind, we looked for free, open-source, solutions that we might deploy. Among many frameworks, we came across Mollyproject, a framework for the rapid development of information and service portals targeted at mobile internet devices, originally developed at Oxford University for their own mobile portal. When we tried it for the first time, it was still very unstable and could not run properly on our servers. But we found a developers community with very similar goals to ours, willing to serve their town and their institution. We decided to contribute to the development of the project. We provided documentation on how to run the Molly framework on different systems, and became contributors of code. Molly was released with its version 1 and shortly afterwards we went live.

Inter-academic collaboration has been a driving force of this project: originally developed for one single institution, with its peculiar structure and territorial diffusion, it was improved and adapted to serve different communities. The great developments in the London Open Data Store allowed us to add live transport data to the portal, letting us have enthusiastic reactions from our students, and these were soon integrated in the Molly project framework with great help from the project community. I think this is a good example of how institutions should collaborate to get services running. A joint effort can lead to a quality product, as I believe the Molly project is.

The local community is starting to use and appreciate the portal, with some great feedback received an the Wandsworth Guardian reporting about a “site launched to serve the community”. I’m personally very happy to be leading this project as it is confirming my idea that the collaborative and transparent cultures of open source and open data can lead to improved services and better relationships with people around us, all things that will benefit the institutions we work for. The work is not complete and we are trying to extend the range of services we offer to both St. George’s and external users; but what we really care and are happy about is that we’re setting an example to other institution of how localism and a mission to provide better services can meet to help build better communities.

Can Open Data be an opportunity for better services, with respect with user experience? Certainly so.

As noted on the Public Strategist blog, the current Bus Countdown display is not the best ever: it gives information too far in the future in a way that isn’t suited to someone already at the bus stop, unless they’re polling the display for information going back and forth from their home.

Pretty obviously, when there is just one single means through which this kind of information are spread to the public, usability is managed centrally by the authority in charge of such information. Surely, this authority might invest on usability and accessibility and let people access such information in multiple formats on different devices or by different means.

As Public Strategist suggests, if I’m at the bus stop I’ll just need to know when the next bus will come; say I’m waiting for bus number 91: I’m not interested in knowing I have three 91 buses coming in half an hour, I just need the first, maybe the second. However, when I’m at home I might want to know when all the next “instances” of a given bus will pass in a longer term.

This is exactly where the open data revolution can make a difference: by letting developers play with the data, they can propose novel solutions to the public, better interaction models, or simply a number of different ways to access the information – number that a single, resource-constrained, organisation is unable to manage.

Open Data are a liberating tool for Government transparence; but they can also empower designers and developers to create a better experience for the public. This is surely a very important, although less ideological, reason why local authorities and larger organisation should welcome this revolution.

I know. I’ve been silent for too long.

The reason is, as most of you know already, I’ve been developing and launching a mobile app. LiveRugby, inspired by the awesome work made by Colm on his TotalFootball and StatsZone apps, promises to be the definitive way to generate and share graphical analysis and statistics for the data-centric rugby fan during the next World Cup. I chose an app about rugby because is something I understand and I’m passionate about. I wanted to learn more about rugby, and more about mobile applications, and this seemed the best opportunity.

I still can’t say much as many information are, in a way, “secret” until and I need to get some clearance from one of the suppliers. But, I promise, I’ll be writing soon about it.
For the moment, let me just give you a list of what I wanted to experiment with this venture:

• Planning the application
• Dealing with the supplier of data, OptaSports
• Being able to project manage myself
• Research what kind of statistics might be useful in a sport like rugby and how to display them in a way that is easy to understand to the average fan
• Develop a full application on my own
• Being able to outsource part of the artwork to a graphic designer
• Launch the app on the market
• Start a marketing campaign on my own getting in touch with press and media
• Communicating and satisfying customers-users

At the moment the app is launched on the Android market, although I’m already working for an iPhone version for the RBS 6 Nations. Of course, a business venture like this is successful when a profit is made out of it.
However, there are several other measures of success that I need to take in account, roughly at every point of this list.

Whether this project has been a success or not will be subject to analysis and to a more detailed blog post when it will be time to make a balance. For the moment, I’m totally enjoying the learning experience it has been so far, and the constant challenge posed by launching your own enterprise.

I’d like to know what my readers think :-)

A couple of weeks ago my flatmate, Claudio, was called by a very angry Police officer who wanted to question him as a possible suspect for breaking some other guy’s ribs at Leicester Square tube station on a night last December. Everyone who knows him would consider this very possibility almost a funny one to think about. However, the whole episode was great to think about… privacy and data!

The first thing that comes to the mind of the person being questioned, and being confident of their own innocence, is “I need an alibi“. “It was not me” is not sufficient to the Police, they will ask “Ok – so what where you doing that day at that time“?.
Of course, when asked this question you are surprised enough, and possibly shocked and worried about consequences, that you don’t necessarily remember. It’s easy to fall into despair. “What will I say?“, he asked me.

This is when I thought about the magic word: “data“.

Each one of us disseminates data about themselves, especially heavy Internet users as we both are. So, the first thing I did was to check my Gmail account. E-mails and chats for that specific date. A day like any other became suddenly meaningful and full of memories.

For example, there was a significant lower amount of e-mails than my average day, a sign that I was mostly out, not at work. It turned out it was a Saturday. It seemed from my e-mails that I was heading to a party that night: it turns out I was at my rugby team’s Christmas party.

Why is what *I* was doing useful to Claudio? Very simply, because we spend most Saturday evenings with the same group of friends. Apparently I was not with him that Saturday – I could not be his alibi. It also seemed I checked back at my station around 11pm. A very early time to go back home on a Saturday after a party. What happened?
Before despairing, I made a step back to the e-mail flow and found a very peculiar e-mail at about 1230 saying just “Klaus” and a phone number. Funnily enough, I don’t know anyone called Klaus so… who is Klaus? Why did I mail his number?

You should know that I live between Alexandra Palace and Wood Green and I have this habit of walking to Muswell Hill for a coffee on Saturday mornings. I also tend to have lunch at home. So, 1230… I was probably on the way back from Muswell Hill. So I started – using OpenStreetMaps – to check for all possible locations I tend to visit on the way back. There’s a shop, a tennis club I’ve played at, a friend who lives at the corner of the tennis club, a couple of cafes, and a Piano shop.
That’s when the Eureka bulb switched on.

I headed to Facebook: not many status updates, but one very important with a photograph. A single photograph showing me in a bus, on the way back home, with heavy snow outside!
I remembered that to avoid the snow I entered the Piano shop. I was moving to another flat at the time, and was investigating the possibility of getting a free piano from the Freecycle. I entered the piano shop to enquire about the cost of piano removals – Klaus being the name of the van man. That’s also why I headed back home very early after the party: I was worried about transport not working because of the snow. I remembered I found Claudio at home when I was back.

I checked again my e-mails and chats: the flow interrupted around 6pm. Basically, there was a hole of about 4 hours in which I didn’t know where Claudio was. Still, we had a track of where and when to look at. There was no chat/e-mail/facebook status update from him on that night, suggesting he had been out, too. Hence, we contacted all our common friends he could have been with that night. All of a sudden he said: “Now I remember it all! After you went out, I called Jasmin and went with her for dinner at Satsuma with her friend visiting from america“. In less than 20 minutes, photos showing him in the restaurant were in his e-mail account.

More interestingly, it turned out he actually was at Leicester Square tube station when the police claims he was. More worringly, he had been alone for some time before meeting his friend.
I’m not a good thriller writer. The finale is probably obvious to you now. He had touched his Oyster card out at the same time the person the Police is looking for was in the view of a CCTV camera. Of course when Police showed us the pictures, it was obviously not him: they had called him because his Oyster card is registered.
But can you see why I’m amazed by this story? A day of which we couldn’t remember anything is now a story full of details.

Moreover: there was an accusation built on data (coming from the Oyster Card system), to which we found a defense built on data (coming from Gmail, Foursquare, and Facebook).

I began to think what this story would have been before Gmail, before Facebook, before check-ins? I know the answer: Claudio would have gone to the police scared, unable to answer the questions in all of his honesty, almost sure he had no way of defending himself. Instead, thanks to this data society he was able to go there without any fear, ready to hear their story and to respond to their questions, being sure he knew every move of that day.
Online services have become our memory.

Don’t get me wrong: I still find problematic the use of users data and the way most online companies deal with privacy. It’s maybe scary the fact that on-line strangers-managed services have become a replacement for our own memory. However, the mountain of data they allow us to have access to can be useful and helpful. The question is how to make good use of these data, and store them in a secure and private way that allow us to decide who we want to share the data with (luckily not the Police).

Personal lesson learnt: I will now save all my Oyster history (before it expires every 3 months), check-ins, and latitude. I want to be ready for questioning.

Disclaimer: This is a dashboard/notepad-like stream of ideas and questions, rather than a proper blog post :-)

WherecampEU, Berlin

An amazing time with some of the best minds around. Some points I’d like to put down and think about later:

1) Ed Parsons (@edparsons) run a very interactive session about what kind of open data developers expect from public authorities and companies. One of the questions asked was “would you pay to get access to open data?“. This issue has long been overlooked. Consider for a moment just public authorities: they are non-profit entities. Attaching an open license to data is quick and cheap. Maintaining those data and making them accessible to everyone is not. As developers and activists we need to push the Government to publish as many data they can. However, we want data to be sustainable. We don’t want to lose access to data for lack of resources (think about Tfl’s TrackerNet). Brainstorming needed…

2) Gary Gale (@vicchi) and his session on mapping as a democratic tool can be reduced to a motto: We left OS times, we are in OSM times. Starting from the consideration we don’t talk about addresses but about places, part of the talk was dedicated to the effort Gary and others are putting into defining a POI standard. The idea is to let the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, etc…, store their places in a format that makes importing and exporting easy. Nice for neogeographers like us, but does the market really want it? Some big players are part of the POI WG, some are not.

3) I really enjoyed the sessions on mobile games, especially the treasure hunt run by Skobbler. However, some of these companies seem to suffer from the “yet another Starbucks voucher” syndrome. I’m sure that vouchers and check-ins can be part of a business plan, but when asked how they intend to monetize their effort some of these companies reply with a standard “we have some ideas, we are holding some meetings“. Another issue that needs to be addressed carefully – and that seems to be a hard one – is how to ensure that location is reported accurately and honestly. It doesn’t take Al Capone to understand you can easily cheat on your location and that when money are involved things can get weird.

4) It was lovely to see Nokia and Google on the same stage. Will it translate in some cooperation, especially with respect to point 2)?

5) I can’t but express my awe at what CASA are working on. Ollie‘s maps should make it to the manual for every public authority’s manager: they are not just beautiful, but they make concepts and problem analysis evident and easy to be appreciated by people who are not geo-experts. And by the way, Steven‘s got my dream job, dealing with maps, data, and RepRap :D

6) Mark run a brainstorming session about his PhD topic: how to evaluate trust in citizen reported human crisis reports. This is a very interesting topic, and he reports about it extensively on his blog. However, I’m not sure this question can have a single answer. What I feel is that different situations might require different models of trust evaluation, to the point that each incident could be so peculiar that even creating categories of crisis would result impossible. Mark’s statistical stance on starting his work might return an interesting analysis. I’m looking forward to see how things develop.

7) Martijn‘s talk about representing history in OpenStreetMap exposes a big problem: how to deal with the evolution of a map. This is important from two points of view: tracing down errors, and representing history. This problem requires a good brainstorming session, too :-)

8) Can’t help but praise Chris Osborne for his big data visualisation exposing mcknut‘s personal life :-) And also for being the best supplier of quotes of the day and a great organiser of this event, as much as Gary.

What didn’t quite work

Just a couple of things, actually:
1 – live code presentations are doomed, as Gary suggested. They need better preparation and testing.
2 – no talk should start with “I’ve just put these things together”. Despite this being an unconference, that shouldn’t mean you want to show something bad quality. Or anyway give that impression.

Me wantz

Next time I wish to have:
1 – PechaKucha-style lightening presentations on day 1, to help people understand what sessions they want to attend
2 – similarly to point 1, a wiki with session descriptions and, upon completion, comments, code, slides, etc…
3 – a hacking/hands on/workshop session, on the model of those run at #dev8d.

NewScientist reports on April 30th that Futureful, a Finnish start-up, is building a predictive iPad based search engine that will use a recommender system. By harvesting information from social feeds from Facebook, Twitter, etc…, its algorithm take the topics that are trending, it analyses the users’ interests and behaviour, and recommends new topics that might interest them.

Eric Schmidt is also quoted as having said “The ability to tell me things I didn’t know but am probably very interested in is the next great stage of search“.

I am possibly cynical about this topic and have extensively blogged (Who wants to be recommended?, May 2009) about the problem of appropriate recommendations and the ability to surprise of such systems.

The problems I see relate to how you are supposed to evaluate a system whose task is to generate surprising recommendations. Especially in academic research, the success of a recommendation engine is traditionally evaluated using a very simple metric: take a list of users choices on the given domain, hide a number of entries, check if the recommender system returns them upon analysing the remaining ones. Straightforward, although several other metrics have been proposed.

Now, how are you supposed to evaluate a system that doesn’t have a reference list? We can surely think of many metrics, some of them quantitative, some of them qualitative (or even social-based):

• the probability a user follows the suggested link
• the strength of the trust feeling towards the recommender
• the fact that a user suggests the recommender system to other users …

However, a metric needs to be meaningful and qualitative metrics often lack this meaningfulness. If I’m a user and I want to be surprised, I will be probably following any random link. I often do that in what I call my serendipitous Wikipedia crawls. My favourite recommender system is, above all, Twitter: I only follow people that make me learn something interesting. Not one of the people that Twitter’s “Who to follow” system recommended me was relevant to me.

So I am a bit confused: what exactly a predictive search engine is really trying to achieve?

A good level of participation for yesterday night GeoMob. Despite two speakers’ defections we had a well balanced schedule (one big company, one researcher, one startup) and a rich Q&A session. Here’s my usual summary with some thoughts embedded.

Microsoft Bing Maps, by Vikas Arora (@vikasar), Solution Sales Specialist
General show-case talk as we often have from big companies. However, some interesting products seem to be coming out of the Microsoft pipeline, especially StreetSlide and the partially related Photosynth. Some awesome novelty (although not immediately usable) like the amazing live Augmented Reality video stream on a static image view. I’m not totally sure the GeoMob crowd is the right one to show AR ;-)

There was some good debating about updating StreetSlide imagery, thanks to a question by Ollie. This is a well known problem in Google StreetView, especially in busy London High Streets where shops sometimes change hands multiple times in a year. As a result, by the time StreetView imagery has reached Google’s servers it displays a vintage version of reality. Vikas claims that by partnering with Navteq they will be able to update images every 4-6 months.

Vikas earns the best quote of the night award: “I can’t say much about Nokia except that it’s good for us”.

Mapping Surnames Geographically, by James Cheshire (@spatialanalysis), UCL Geography
I was absolutely fascinated by James’ work upon discovering it on the National Geographic Magazine some months ago. The general subject of this talk is showing how surname origins and popularity can be displayed on a map. Two works were presented about surnames in the US and in London.

The talk and the Q&A session highlighted both the power of a map to show surnames but also its limitations. There are obvious problems of visualization: short and long surnames being displayed in different size, choice of colours, positioning, density, granularity.

Although the map itself is a beautiful item, I think that its dynamic version, able to show the nth most popular surname, is more useful, but only if used… dynamically. What I mean is that in places that are true melting pots like London what it’s interesting is not what surname or surnames are the most popular, but rather what’s the distribution of names of a certain origin in a given place. In other words, given the assumption that certain surnames can be related to certain communities, it’s interesting to see that the first five most popular in a given area are sometimes from five different origins.

James was open about the issues of visualising surnames this way, especially about how to treat granularity (e.g. the Irish community in New York is not as big as it would be). There is lot of work to do in this area and a map is only the tip of the iceberg of research, development, coding, and imagination.

Introducing Eeve, by Jan Senderek (@jansenderek)
Impressive UI analysis for this young start-up whose goal is to let people have fun creating and sharing events. Jan, their CEO, delivered a very interesting talk about how UI can lead to a great mobile application. Their strategy of “mobile first, then web” is interestingly different by that of many other startups around. Event creation and sharing seems to have a mind-boggling peculiarity: initially, events will need to be created in the place where they will be held and shared immediately. No forward planning allowed, which sounds strange but might capture the fantasy of party goers. They plan to extend the service to let event organisers create entries.

The (long) Q&A session seemed critical but was truly interested. First of all, turning myself into the bad guy, I asked what makes them different from their competitors. I’ve attended GeoMob since 2009 and this is at least the third company introducing a similar service, and their unique selling point is not extremely clear. Surely, UI seems to be really good for their app, but is that enough to get to that critical mass of users needed to succeed?

Secondly, the business model seemed not very well defined. Although as any stealth startup Eeve wouldn’t probably disclose too much about it, the general perception was that they need to think about it a bit more accurately, and Jan admitted that.

However, I also have the general impression that small companies presenting at GeoMob (not just Eeve) tend to come just with their shiny iPhone application rather than with the backstage work which might be of great interest. This also gives the wrong impression that most of them are trying to monetise upon nothing more than a mobile app. As it turns out, one of the other LBS introducing at GeoMob a similar event-based app was also selling a CRM system to event organisers which is where their main revenue stream comes from. None of this was mentioned at the presentation and we were left wondering with the same questions.

I won’t mention all the discussions about stalking and privacy: we’ve done that for all companies providing LBS, so nothing new from that perspective. But it’s always good to have our @StevenFeldman pointing that problem out.

To be honest, I’m curious about Eeve and will probably try it out (paying attention to privacy, of course :P). It would be nice to have a report on how many users join the system and especially their B2B strategy.
Maybe for a next GeoMob?

This is the content of my letter published by the New Scientist.

It refers to Dan Hind’s proposal, on a previous issue, to make research topics subject to public scrutiny in order to create a “democracy of research” free from the action of lobbies. I suspect this is dangerous at worst and naive at best, as this would make the lobbies’ work much easier.

Hind was not available to comment.

From Giuseppe Sollazzo, London, UK

As much as it is true that public scrutiny is the base of every democratic system, I’m not sure that this concept can be easily applied to research anywhere but in an ideal world. Exclusion of people from the voting system based on their level of education would be considered anti-democratic, but what happens when the electorate is ignorant?

In the US, the incoming Republican House majority leader, Eric Cantor, has instigated a public vote that has already favoured cuts in science funding over other areas and is now being used to determine where these cuts should be made (11 December 2010, p 7).

Would Hind let people who voted for Cantor, Sarah Palin and the like decide how to allocate research funds? If not, the democracy is flawed. If he does, good luck to the rest of us.

Thanks to Wordle this is my blog’s word cloud. Unsurprisingly, and forgetting a minute interesting appearences as get and way the winners are users, data, and recommendations.