Opendata campaigns can wait.. There's analogue data to save first!
At the #flookup last night, @cpchannel sparked a great conversation about data and how we're about to lose a lot of the important stuff...
At the moment it seems there are many campaigners for what I see now as a luxury of opendata. This is a worthy cause. I think though there is one to deal with before it. Paper data. @cpchannel (aka Chris in the real world) pointed out that in Henley is the office of an organisation which manages all of the data on small green spaces in the uk; not big parks but those little areas of green which exist all over. Their location data, rights, sizing etc is all stored by this organisation. It is all stored on paper though.Another example is the organisation who keep all of the data on public water fountains (of which there are now only 15 in London @cpchannel informs me, down from arund 2,00 at one point). This organisation too has plenty of useful data but it is all analogue on paper. Which prompts the question, what happens when one of these organisations gives or burns down. All that data is lost. Culturally they're (without exaggeation) run by OAP's who are not bought in to buying the IT mans services for document management and spreadsheets etc... Will a uni graduate want to go and work for a dinosaur of an organisation that is 100% paper based; the concept would be very alien (note there's another topic here as I found out kids at school from 5 learn powerpoint!) So there's all this paper data... There really should be a movement to get it digital... Then we can worry about it being open... At the moment we risk losing information.
