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I caught Mark Drapeau’s piece on the new data.gov website (thanks to Sarah Evans). He points out, correctly, that what most people really want is information. Where he misses a step is in assuming that the government should be making information.gov instead. It’s an easy step to miss.

I’m pretty sure I qualify as one of Mark’s “technical elite”, but I promise you I’m not excited about data.gov because it gives me political power. I’m excited about data.gov for the same reason I’m constantly excited about open source software: many hands make light work. In an ideal world, the government would have elite software developers working ’round the clock to make information.gov a reality. And they would fail. Not because they aren’t smart enough or agile enough, but because it’s way easier to collect data than it is to turn it into information.

As a conservative estimate, the cost of producing information is about one order of magnitude higher than just making data available. Sometimes though, it can be several orders of magnitude. As an example, take any of Hans Rosling’s excellent TED talks. His GapMinder software analyzes data that’s been publicly available from the United Nations for quite a while. So much data was available that key discoveries were missed. After years spent working on GapMinder, Rosling and his team have produced amazing insights into poverty, HIV and many other topics. By contrast, it takes the UN no time at all to make the data available.

I’m sure you saw this coming, but this is not an ideal world. The government can’t afford to hire every great programmer to turn data into information. Not even close. The good news is they don’t have to hire every great programmer. They don’t have to hire any programmers at all. Free data will turn into free information for the same reasons that great open source projects like Firefox and Ruby On Rails come to be. We want to know. We want to scratch our itch. The open data movement is new. Be patient and I promise you that data.gov will turn into information.gov without the government having to lift a finger.