Is BigGov missing a trick here ?

There is a lot of discussion at the moment about budget cuts and the economy and we seem to be bombarded on a daily basis with figures and statistics from one group followed within hours by contradicting data from an opposing group.  Where does all this data come from and how can we use it ?

There is a phrase I'm sure we've all heard

"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

It was popularised by Mark Twain but its origins are variously attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and Sir Charles Wentworh Dilke.
What ever its origin a great many people agree with its sentiment, but why is this ? Surely the numbers cannot lie ?

As engineers we all know that sometimes we don't get the numbers we want from an experiment or test and as engineers we start delving deeper to find an explaination. Sometimes we find the reason, sometimes it's not so easy but having the raw data available makes an informed decision possible as without ALL the relevant data it's not possible to see the whole picture.
 
After the recent devistating earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan the radiation figures available were very limited. This was seen by Shigeru Kobayashi who began Crowd Sourcing radiation data and publishing it on the internet. This gave the general population a single source of open data in addition it was presented in a clear visual form to assist with interpretation of the data.

The radiation map is not the only Crowd Sourced project and they take many different forms some are purely data based like this map showing Twitter traffic during the recent Royal Wedding, some hardware based like this group building there own DIY drones .
 
I think the best illustration of Crowd Sourced data and visualisation is this live map showing the availability of hire bikes in London this is based on Transport for London's open-source data. The availbility of this data has shown distinct patterns in the bikes usage and its interesting to speculate what further information could be gleaned if the train and underground data were made available and integrated.

And Finally...
So my question is :

In these tight economic times why doesn't BigGov make ALL this raw data publically available and allow free use of it ?

What information would you like to see made available ?

I hope you found this blog informative & useful , I welcome your comments either below or via twitter @peterjfrancis