Kindle Notes & Highlights
The final argument for opening up data isn’t about whatever good things we can gain from it. It’s about the fact that opening up government data is just the right thing to do. We paid for it. We own it. We have a right to it.
“There’s no such thing as a private individual anymore,” George Clooney
People in the tech community have a phrase to describe PDF files: “where data goes to die.”
STEAM, NOT STEM
public dashboard that shows you, at a glance, how healthy your community is.
Technology puts power in the hands of the people—if only we let it. And given the fact that our governments—local, state, federal—are perennially short of money and mired in bureaucracy, this transfer of power is clearly the key to democratizing our voices, bringing our nineteenth-century government into the twenty-first century.
“If you can free people from being held down or oppressed by systems, whether public or private, . . . people can choose to make things that suit themselves. We used to live in a world with three TV networks. Now we live in a world where there are a hundred million YouTube videos of dogs on roller skates.” We have entered the era of choice, and although we as a society may not need a hundred million videos of roller-skating dogs, we do need the ability for people to create and distribute information freely.
