Gurstein provides much food for thought with his post From a Test Bed to a Living Lab: Some Community Informatics Thoughts on Community Oriented Science.

His premise is that open data is not the great equalizer it has been pitched as because it fails to take into account the inequality of access to the infrastructure necessary for finding and doing something with this data. As a result those who already have access are promoting the digital divide rather than bridging it (the data rich get data richer, and the data poor get data poorer).

It is a post like this that makes me once again evaluate whether the work at CENS’s Urban Sensing research program is trying to bridge the gap. Their work focuses on developing the tools necessary so that communities can leverage their available technology (cellphones) to study aspects of their communities they find compelling and the platform to enlist the help of other members of the community, through data collection and analysis. This is a distinct departure from the work by many “citizen science” projects which are initiated by someone in academia who taps into the masses to collect data that is then analyzed by the academics.

I feel like the urban sensing group is intentionally trying to sidestep the problems that Gurstein raises through education, different power relationships, ubiquitous equipment, and a very involved privacy policy being hashed out by another researcher from the IS department at UCLA. Hopefully projects this help push the envelope at making open data more open to the people who would not normally have access.

While Gurstein may unfortunately have the measure of “open data” at the moment, hopefully this is not the future of the movement.