That’s a funny panel group photo from 2007. Ed Parsons, then CTO of Ordnance Survey is speaking, and OpenStreetMap’s Steve Coast is clearly glaring at him as if to say “What do you know about Openness?”.

Ed quit Ordnance Survey shortly after to join google maps, but this turns out to be a step backwards in the openness stakes. In the years since, we’ve seen Ordnance Survey open at least some of their data …meanwhile the big G have gradually ramped up Google Map Maker, a crowd-sourcing initiative competing with OpenStreetMap but keeping their raw data closed.

Please see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKP_Dju9UK4, and the International BioChar Initiative at: http://www.biochar-international.org/

Sometimes you get breakthroughs in thinking and communication with clever data presentation. Rockstrom and co’s planetary boundaries had done that, as has the Carbon Bubble work on stranded assets. But even then these only function as data-driven metaphors, not yet as new bits of the dashboard of inflation, interest and unemployment numbers etc.. that you rightly say are what people and politicians really pay attention to.

I do agree that OECD should make their energy data open and stop charging for it (we’ve paid for it already).

But innovation in data analysis and presentation of carbon numbers surely has to start with a problem, not just with a conviction that more data will help keep up the pressure (it isn’t working!)

A couple of areas where where I think some more open and beautiful data could be useful are:

1) The corporate carbon disclosures – we have 10 years of corporate carbon reporting. This needs to be made into open data. It would be useful to be able to make sense of corporate carbon reduction targets and performance in relation to their contribution to economic activity (see http://hiyamaya.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/a-little-tweak-to-the-broken-carbon-dashboard/ ). This would allow us to start to make a link between the corporate carbon dashboards, and the global one and stop giving corporations ‘marks for effort’ in managing carbon emissions.

2) On the question of equity for sustainable development -This is an idea whose time seems to have come (http://hiyamaya.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/equitable-access-to-sustainable-development-an-idea-whose-time-has-come/) – and was being discussed with new urgency at the international climate talks in Bonn last month (http://tcktcktck.org/2013/05/jennifer-morgan-encouraging-signs-of-progress-from-bonn-climate-talks/51899) – the talk is of “equity reference frameworks” which allow national emission reductions pledges to be judged against a meaningful yardstick of fairness and adequacy. There have been some very academic presentations of this, but none that yet have the accessibility of a Hans Rosling type presentation, with sliders and toggles and so on for different options.

3) The Center for Global Development has a really interesting proposal for how to finance emission reduction between countries in energy and forests, but with no financial numbers on it – http://international.cgdev.org/page/forest-monitoring-action-forma-and-forest-conservation-performance-ratings-fcpr – I would love to see someone take this model and cost it

Before pushing for more data I would start by trying to identify the problems and opportunities.

My three questions are all about ways to combine data about emissions with information about money/value, time/ambition and equity/fairness. I am sure there are other ways of asking the same question (which may be smarter than mine). But ultimately a dashboard is going to have to combine these four dimensions in a way that helps to guide action and decision making.