The global society, the landscape of our global community is really changing rapidly and there
are trends that are developing that I think embrace and accelerated could have a profound
positive effect on the trajectory of our global society.
And I think the open source movement, data sharing I think is a very, very big part of
that.
It’s important for organizations to have all the pieces of the puzzle, especially if
these are development organizations, these are crisis response organizations.
But we have not to date really had a sufficient effective means to share data.
And by that I don’t mean we have technical barriers to sharing data.
We have cultural barriers to sharing data.
There are a lot of organizations around the world including crisis response and development
and humanitarian organizations that are reluctant to share the real data that enables true collaboration
and I think that’s a mindset we need to get around.
The other thing is there’s a difference between providing data and providing data
in a useable user friendly way that people could actually use for good.
And so there are a lot of efforts around the world to be able to take particularly big
data and to put that into bite size bits to put that in something that can be used by
the public, used by citizen scientists, used by governments to create good.
And I think there’s a strong movement in that direction but we’ve got a long way
to go.
One of the things that I think is really going to affect our global society is – and one
of the things that I think is going to propel open source and transparency and data sharing
is I believe that true open collaboration which requires all those things is going to
be a tremendous economic engine.
And I think that those organizations and those people and those governments that deal in
corruption and deal in secretive dealing – those organizations that take an exclusively proprietary
mindset are going to see themselves being left behind.
And they’re going to have to adapt and evolve and take on a much more collaborative and
cooperative mindset to be able to keep up with the economic growth that true open collaboration
will bring.
And I think this is a really significant trend.
You know there’s many problems that we face as a global society.
Corruption for instance.
I don’t think – we’ve had corruption probably since the first transaction and I
don’t think we’re going to be able to tackle that head on.
But we can potentially make corruption obsolete by making it irrelevant, by making it be an
ineffective way to do business.