If “open source” was the rallying cry of the past two decades, “open data” may be the call to arms for the next two. Or it would be, if only we could figure out what it means.
I recently raised that banner and was met by thunderous applause. Hurray, right? Well, despite the dopamine hit (you like me, you really like me!), everyone seemed to be cheering for different things. Love it or hate it, open source has come to mean something relatively standard due to the efforts of the Open Source Initiative. No such organization exists for open data.