SPECIAL FEATURE
WHATSAPP, FACEBOOK AND NEW WAYS OF THINKING
The first United Nations World Data Forum took place in Cape Town, South Africa, in January 2017. The forum laid the foundations for a new joint focus to work together with data – to enhance interoperability – to measure and promote sustainable development. Just two years later, Perucci believes that progress has been made beyond initial expectations. “So many data
partnerships are underway; so much work has advanced,” she says. “But there is a lot of work still to be done. A lack of resources and capacity is a key constraint.” It’s a commonly acknowledged problem within the global data community (which Perucci explains is so close-knit, most of them are connected via a WhatsApp group) that financial support for statistics needs to increase. In their bestselling book Big
Data2 , Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger,
“All my life I’ve known that data can be the answer to a lot of
problems. We need to convince people with
real facts.” Francesca Perucci
a professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Kenneth Cukier, data editor of the Economist newspaper, argue that just a few years ago (perhaps a little before the UN’s aforementioned data revolution report in 2014), there was a change in mindset about how data could be used: “Data was no longer regarded as static or stale, whose usefulness was finished once the purpose for which it was collated was achieved,” they write. “…Rather, data became a raw material of business, a vital economic input, used to create a new form of economic value.” Facebook, and others, have demonstrated time and again the opportunities and challenges associated with the data explosion. Perucci recognizes the change in mindset and says that until more recently, statisticians had tended to think: ‘how do we produce the perfect data?’. “Producing good data is important, of course, but you also need to make a space to be creative; to utilize all the new data sources,” she says. “Statisticians haven’t always thought about the next step. But it’s changing a lot now. A statistician’s job should start before she produces the data: talking to policy makers, asking what they need and how they need it. A lot has been accomplished since Cape Town. There are now lots of opportunities for people to come together to talk about data; to understand how to join forces and produce the data that policy makers need.”
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