I’m still in the early stages of scoping out a manageable masters dissertation on government open data – and just a little overwhelmed by the rapid pace at which open data initiatives are developing all around.
With the development and growth of open data provision rom Data.gov in the US, to data.gov.uk, and today, data.london.gov.uk, alongside consultations on opening up OS data and promises of much more open data to come, at least across western nations, and likely many more, it’s pretty hard to keep up with what’s going on – and think about a discrete research project that can take place and generate something useful by July.
However, I’m getting closer to a set of questions, with a focus on the relationship between open data providers, mediators (who code interfaces, tools and utilities using open data), and end-users of open data, or open-data enabled services.
Quite how to formulate the questions, and to design a research methodology that leads to achievable, and useful, ends – is one of the big challenges for the coming weeks.
Open research in a dynamic area
In a couple of weeks time, the second full term of the MSc here at OII starts – and one of the modules I’m very much looking forward to taking is that on Networks of Collaboration and how research is transformed by the Internet. I’m looking forward to it not least to help me work out how best to be ‘open’ in the process of carrying out this research.
So far, you can find my collection of annotated bookmarks on all things open data on delicious – and that collection is acting as my main link store for the project. But as yet I’ve not fully worked out how to make use of this blog as a public journal of the project, hence the limited posting thus-far.
Blogging is an act of participation. And as open data developments are coming thick and fast meaningful participation is likely to be not only in academic analysis of phenomena, but in the development phenomena themselves. The idea of the researcher as entirely distinct from the area of study, whenever that study is of social life, is not one I can subscribe to. Writing the researcher out of the research is rarely possible in an absolute sense. Yet, equally, there is a risk that too much participation, or participation too early with provisional ideas, can make it very hard for researcher to step into the background of research when it is written up.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying: this blog may start of a little quieter than those of previous project I’ve worked on. But I’m committed to using it to share learning, both from the substantive research this project will involve, and from the process of carrying it out
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