wfdd:

over these past couple of years i've been working on collecting parliament data
from official publications
putting it together and labelling it
giving it structure
so that it can be consumed by computers
so that it can be manipulated
so as to be consumed by laypeople
i've published all of my work online under a free-software license
the harvester, the data itself, and the apps I've built on top of the data
so i wanna talk a bit about the chasm between what i do and what NGOs and the government and companies do
the contrast between array and disarray
the context within which the opening up of knowledge is understood
on the one hand we have organisations working inside this deeply hierarchical network
they receive funding
be it from the EU
be it in grants
be it through investing
they share an ontology
then we have people like me who've not managed to properly infiltrate the network
who've fallen by the wayside a tiny bit
for whatever reason
(this isn't a source of income)
who've not really thought this through
who've adopted the vocabulary of their masters
but with different connotations
i might attempt to justify what i do as a push towards transparency
but this is disingenuous
elementarily because it can't have an impact
(this is probably the first time any of you have ever even heard about this)
but even if it did have an impact
evidence has shown it's usually not the desired impact
that is, civic apps tend to underscore the worst of public dealings
increasing dissatisfaction among the public with how the {village,city,district,government,world} is run
reinforcing the gap between the powerful and powerless
be it indirectly
maybe because we're unable to convert the information that is given to us into knowledge
we don't really know how to affect change
we truly are dispossessed
but do we actually want to affect change
or are we looking for something to be part of
i think what we're looking for is intimacy
and that's what they're looking for too
we find ours in dissonance, they find theirs in structure

wfdd:

In my mind a pretty big issue with open data is provenance.  Formal structures carry a certain sense of authority which might be difficult to shake off.  Projects like Who's On First, which do attempt to encode a multiplicity of - say - overlapping or conflicting entities, stop short of associating individual entities with their sources.  I think this might be in part attributable to the observable difficulty of programmatically traversing deeply nested structures.  (Inline citations would introduce an additional level of indirection if they were to accompany their values.)  This latter point fits into how programming and formal languages more broadly might shape how we understand the world around us in a feedback loop-y sort of way.

so I understand the term provenance. & I understand there's a kind of ontology involved in relation to provenance. & structures, & metadata. & then a reality feedback look : D