My mission, if I choose to accept it, is to set previously guarded data free by placing private data back into the public domain. In other words, I want to ‘open source businesses’. I want to get businesses to ‘free up their data’ by means of visualisations to outline what the company does, make awareness to a particular point or just simply involve the public in the development of the company or a particular product. I will have to develop a method of getting data out of companies in such a way that benefits them or interests them in drawing more attention to what they do. Taking the archOS system as an example, the data from the archOS system on water usage is made available, or ‘open sourced’ for the use in visualisations to facilitate awareness to the amount of water that is consumed and used within one building each day. Another example could be Exploratorium’s ‘Cabspotting’ Project where San Francisco’s taxi cabs a traced as they travel through the town using the taxi companies GPS data of the numerous cars’ positions. This data can be considered as the private source code of the company as this is what is used to facilitate the dispatchers in getting a cab successfully to a client. Opening up this data to the public highlights economic, social and cultural trends at the same time as being an advert for the taxi company’s activity.
The idea that releasing source code into the public domain benefits not only the company in its development but also brings a sense of wealth back into the public domain is one that I am keen to make a point of with this project.