From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

Why should we democratize data?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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Why should we democratize data?

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(upbeat music) - [Interviewer] I want to go back to the point about doctor rankings. You said now patients can see what doctors are ranked, or what certain institutes are ranked. Is that what we mean by democratizing data? Is that kind of the point of democratizing? - The first is, you can see some of aspects of the rankings. A tremendous amount more still needs to be done. The fundamental part, though, to your question there of democratizing data is that you're opening up the data so everyone can do it, and you're opening it up in a responsible way. The big power of when data science was starting to move as its own entity is that in platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, within those companies, anybody could access the data. That was a democratization component. In that same way, the force multiplier that's happened, whether it's in other companies or in the government, has been that you don't know who's going to be able to do something interesting or exciting with the data, so open it up. Don't allow somebody to just hold it close and protect it because they have some political reason around the data or something else. There's an incredible opportunity if we open up even more data. Imagine what happens if we open up more data around gun violence. What could we learn? If we open more data around questions around, whether it's foster kids? Or questions even that we've seen recently in Puerto Rico around the number of deaths that happened in the hurricanes? Those kinds of questions, once opened up, we see very different answers. We've seen this time and time again, every time a dataset is opened up. I get a note from how somebody's used it, I go, I would have never thought of that. That's the whole point, is we collectively can think about a large range of ideas, but individually, we're limited by our own experiences. (upbeat music)

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