A few weeks ago I blogged about the fact that too few government agencies were leveraging their enormous stores of data in ways that could contribute directly to the public good. While leaders in the non-profit community are coming up with brilliant data-based Web applications such as scorecard.org and NKCA, the vast majority of government data sits behind impenetrable bureaucratic silos where only a select group of policy analysts can access it.

In part, the lack of initiative may be attributable to a failure of imagination. It most certainly has something to do with the fact that governmental data is scattered across many different agencies in irreconcilable formats and databases, making it hard to extract and combine in useful ways. Of course, there are also legitimate concerns about privacy and security. Above all, making good use of data is hard to do. It takes great creativity and skill to put data into graphical formats that non-experts can readily understand.

One person who is well ahead of the curve is Hans Rosling, a Swedish professor who runs a non-profit called Gapminder that specializes in using public data to expose global inequalities. His website is loaded with interacive flash applications that illustrate a wide range of human development issues. I also recommend you take a look at his talk last year to the TED forum.

In a world of Web services, we should really be following Rosling’s lead: let’s open up public databases and make them searchable and “mashable” so that more people can participate in creating Web-based applications that demonstrate how the world is changing around us. I predict that the pay-offs measured in terms of knowledge-creation and advocacy would be enormous. Whether politicians will be eager to support this is questionable, after all they would no longer be able to hide behind a veil of obfuscation!