soup
@antderosa | facebook | testimonials | ask me anything
topics: syria | egypt | bahrain | libya | china | afghanistan | iran | iraq | japan | architecture | scandanavia | science | tech | art | design | photography
-
-
Making transparency and data useful for all
One of the themes I keep hearing at Davos is about open access to data and transparency by governments. There has been an open government movement for many years now with varying levels of success but we haven’t seen the type of major shift in power to the hands of citizen as a result. You can lead a society to information but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be mobilized to do anything with it.
Along with the OpenGov movement, there needs to be an equally, if not more aggressive one, on how to use the relevant data points. I’m not talking about economists and political scientists, I’m talking about average middle and lower class citizens who are too busy trying to make a living to wallow in punditry and wonk. I’m not advocating slacktivism, but a way people can see how this data affects them in a real and tangible way, and how they can do something about it. -
The Gitmo leaks
The Washington Post, McClatchy, the New York Times and National Public Radio all published stories today on the Guantanamo Bay detainees. The Post disclosed new details on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leaders on 9/11 and in the months immediately afterward. McClatchy focused on the government’s creation of a largely ineffective “human intelligence laboratory.”
NYT and NPR’s stories and digital presentations take a broad look at the information revealed in the documents and create useful digital interactives to show patterns. (The Post sourced its documents from Wikileaks, while the NYT and NPR have said they obtained the same documents from a different source.)
From an innovations perspective, the idea of a NYT-NPR cooperative effort itself is intriguing. It looks as though both organizations built separate interactives that point to the same set of documents. Those documents are hosted on a co-branded NYT project site and make good use of the DocumentCloud viewer. In times of fast news and limited resources, that kind of cooperation makes a lot of sense. It’s an efficiency newsrooms might have never considered several years ago, especially with a competitive story such as this. Each of these four news organization’s different approaches offer different angles into the stories behind the data. In the end, that’s great for journalism.
Cory Haik / Deputy Editor, Universal News
-
I guess you could say I was a Foursquare early adopter.
User #389 of over 6 million.
Find out what number you are along with some other cool infographics about your Foursquare activity with FourGraph
-
Tons of Facebook Stats and Demographics at Facebakers
-
