See the original post on the Digital Revolution blog
To free data or not to free data: that is quite a big question. The cases for opening up data are revolutionary: data freedom would utterly transform what we could do for ourselves, for each other, for the world. The cases against are usually wrapped up in the context of commercial ownership, intellectual property and national security.
Personally, I am cautiously, respectfully sceptical. As a social psychologist who studies the human interactions that criss-cross the Internet, I see a whole lot of community phenomena that challenge my faith in the liberated digital culture that the data freedom contingent describes, but I don’t believe it should be owned either. Nicely on the fence, then. The problem as I see it is that technologically, an open data system would be remarkable; socially, it simply wouldn’t last.
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