Today, the New York Times looks at big changes taking placing at the World Bank. The big 'ol banking behemoth is throwing open its doors-making its raw data sets available to the public for the first time.
For more than a year, the bank has been releasing its prized data sets, currently giving public access to more than 7,000 that were previously available only to some 140,000 subscribers — mostly governments and researchers, who pay to gain access to it.
Those data sets contain all sorts of information about the developing world, whether workaday economic statistics — gross domestic product, consumer price inflation and the like — or arcana like how many women are breast-feeding their children in rural Peru.
It is a trove unlike anything else in the world, and, it turns out, highly valuable.
The article is mostly about culture clash within the decades-old financial body: stirred up by a new generation of World Bankers who are pushing for more institutional transparency (live-streams of closed-door meetings, public data dumps, etc...).
But what's most interesting is the part of the article that talks about Haiti. In January 2010 (shortly after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince) the World Bank sent a plane to take aerial photographs of the country. The Bank then released those photographs to the public-inviting engineers from all over the world to study them, and then offer advise on how/where to funnel aid money.
“As opposed to some imperious bureaucracy in Washington, we’re making things open and accessible to people,” [Robert Zoellick] says. “That makes for better performance, it makes for a more open system, it makes for people having a different attitude about the World Bank.”
Haiti was crowdsourced. International development, says Zoellick, can be improved with a crowdsourcing model.
I wonder if the I.M.F could start using crowdsourcing too? Give us some of that Greek financial data, and let's see what we can do...
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