Open Source Homeland

The Pet Connection Blog has a follow-up post to the widely reported number of 300 deaths due to the pet food recall of earlier this year:

Which, of course, it won’t ever be, for reasons ranging from the lack of death certificates for animals to the number of pets especially cats who never showed up again after eating tainted food, to political issues involving powerful corporate and governmental interests.In other words, if you’re waiting for the government you pay for to tell you how many pets died, how much it cost the citizens of this country and how close the tainted ingredients came to affecting your children, well … don’t hold your breath.

This site had done their own grass-roots database in an attempt to get to the real numbers. Data sure is easy to manipulate, isn’t it?

In the wake of the pet food contamination recall crisis, where pets are being poisoned from pet food, a database created by veterinarian Dr. Marty Becker has gotten a lot of attention. Good things:

• It’s great that someone other than the government is collecting this information
• It’s great that they link to the FDA site– government/private cooperation

But

• They only display the aggregate numbers
• No ability for others to analyze the data
• No geographic representation of the data

Tools like Google Maps and Frappr make it easy to do more with data. Data presented publicly can be analyzed by the crowd, making for more connections, more thinking. Publicly collected data ought to be displayed publicly.