Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/29869
An Information Aristocracy Rises Beyond Crowdsourcing and Web 2.0 BUILDINGTHEGEOWEB I n early 2011, my father celebrated his 90th birthday. To prepare for this event, I did some research on my family tree, reflecting on the nature of crowdsourced data and data control in general. In constructing my family tree, I came BY RON LAKE across a number of sites that can help with the process, most of which have a business model that depends on making use of information sourced by other members. I pay to find out when my “tree” potentially intersects another member’s tree, using the information in their tree should I choose to enhance or fix errors in my own. To some extent, the mechanism works, especially for more-distant relatives or ancestors, as one can fairly immediately build a connection into the relatively distant past. Crowdsourcing on Borrowed Time While doing this, however, I realized that my gen- eration, or perhaps that of my children, might be the last that would need to engage in this activity. After the base information is known, one can sim- ply plug in a new offspring to the already existing tree of ancestors. In fact, I can see that being possible for at least a fair fraction of the privileged part of humanity. No need for any more crowdsourcing; simply update the tree using the new birth record, something that can be done automatically at the point of registration. That had me thinking further: who should be Ron Lake is president, Galdos Systems Inc.; e-mail: rlake@ galdosinc.com, blog: www. galdosinc.com/ archives/category/ media-center/blog. 30 doing this? Should the government? They issue the birth certificates, but they don’t have the information base—the tree of ancestors into which to plug the new data. I have that, right? Wrong. The information utility into which I put the information has it. Should the people who manage that utility take over the process of registration? Will they? Will your identity be maintained in the future in a private agency’s databases? None of the sites I looked at provided any simple portable means to export my information so I could move it somewhere else or keep it for myself. They G E O W O R L D / A P R I L 2 O 1 1 provide nice tools to capture it, but no tools at all to package and export it for my own use. So even if I could claim that I owned the information, I couldn’t use it (or delete it) in any practical sense. The New Aristocracy That got me thinking even further afield, reminding me of the rise of the landed aristocracy in the early Middle Ages. Are we now witnessing the rise of an “information aristocracy” in our own time? Will we have a class of people who control access to infor- mation, as their medieval peers did with land? Do they control or own the information any more than the landed gentry controlled or owned the land? Will we see some sort of democratic revolution in the future, where individuals will take up arms against this information aristocracy? Is this reasonable in an open and democratic society, or are we indeed witnessing the rise of information aristocrats? Think of these issues now in terms of geospatial information. After the base data are in place (e.g., a 2-D map or 3-D city model), is there a need for further crowdsourcing? Wouldn’t it make more sense that this geographic information be updated automatically by government business processes when registering a change to a road, building or other structure? Can’t this be accomplished completely automatically? Will this be the purview of government, or will such automated data management move into the private sector? Will we see private agencies in con- trol of fundamental information? Is this reasonable in an open and democratic society, or are we indeed witnessing the rise of information aristocrats? Mobility/GPS Special Issue