Open Data, Political Crisis and Guerrilla Cartography | Samuel Rufat | ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies
►http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1150
Open data and the geoweb have emerged, along with the rhetoric of democratization and a promise that increased user participation would lead to more empowered citizens. Recently, European rules have attempted to make the availability and re-use of data from everywhere much easier. The EU Open Data rules are shifting issues from finding information to selecting the more relevant data and enabling new approaches to the real-time scrutiny of powerful institutions. However, geography, open data and the Internet are obviously not intrinsically subversive.
(...) However, shifting the production of meaning from the few to the many requires more trained brains than dot.com domains. What matters most is grasping ‘dead’ data, giving it ‘live’ meaning, producing reusable information just in time, rapidly transforming data into political leverage and sharing it in an efficient manner. This paper showcases the possibilities of crowdsourcing geography and #guerrilla_cartography by using the political crisis in #Romania that took place during the summer of 2012.