Starting Small with Open and Big Data

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One of the positive take-aways I got from the trip to Asheville, NC with my colleague, Chad Foley, is that any data effort can start small. The World Bank Blog also advocates this. The other take away is we need to think about the questions we want to posit to our data. Sometimes looking at data and thinking about data can be overwhelming. Like any information project, the first question I like to ask is "Why are we doing this?". The second is "what story or narrative does this data tell us?". Sometimes there are several narratives embedded within a dataset or a bigger narrative in a federated dataset. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach to looking at the data within any organization usually yields the best narratives.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/big-data-you-can-start-small

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