Early in 2006, I decided that what The Guardian‘s technology section really needed was a campaign. Campaigns energise readers. But a campaign about what?
I’ve always liked statistics. So obviously it had to be about data. I already felt that the UK government’s mapping data should be available to us all for free, as it was in the US. What was needed was some inspiration.
In February that year, a man called Hans Rosling had ambled up to a stand to give a TED talk that provided just that inspiration. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute (the place which hands out Nobels), he began by explaining how his students knew less than chimpanzees about child mortality in different countries.
He set them five multiple-choice questions, offering pairs of countries where the value differed by a factor of at least two. Where was child mortality highest: Sri Lanka or Turkey? Pakistan or Vietnam? Poland or South Korea? The students averaged 1.8 out of five; chimps would have got 2.5.
And then his talk went into overdrive. No PowerPoint for Rosling. Instead he showed giant animations, using United Nations data, which illustrated how, over time, poverty had shifted (more people earn more than $1 per day); how families in Vietnam had become smaller as lifespans had lengthened; how child survival rates varied over time depending on countries’ per-capita GDP and economic strategies.
Blobs showing Africa’s economic performance as a whole flowered into a string of tinier blobs, with Mauritius coming out – perhaps surprisingly, but surprise is the value of data visualisation – at the top of the heap.
It was gob-smacking: you can’t listen to the horse-race pace at which he narrates the changes in demographics and earnings, without feeling some of his excitement.
But it was the message he added to that which crystallised his entire manifesto – and what I wanted our readers to understand.
“Why don’t we see more progress?” he asked. “Because the data is hidden down in the databases [owned by governments and other organisations]. People put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics, and this won’t work…
“Everyone says ‘It’s impossible [to open up the databases], our data is so peculiar, we can’t give the data free to the students, free to the entrepreneurs’. But this is what we would like to see, isn’t it?”
Of course it is: entrepreneurs can do more with data than governments; and individuals should have a right to see data that their taxes have paid to collect.
Influenced by Rosling, we expanded our ambition. Instead of just talking about mapping data, we started calling for the UK government to make all its non-personal datasets – weather data, tide data, Land Registry data, some Companies House data – free for reuse and commercial exploitation.
That became the Free Our Data campaign, which Michael Cross and I set up, and which (after some help from Tom Watson, then the Cabinet Office minister, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee) culminated in 2010 with the Labour government making Ordnance Survey digital maps available for free. Under David Cameron, many other datasets followed.
Rosling showed us that we weren’t voices in the wilderness; that there were passionate people who could see the value in sharing data about the world and our place in it.
This week, there has been a widespread outpouring of grief at Rosling’s death, at the relatively young age of 68, from pancreatic cancer.
But his cause did not die with him: instead, it needs to be a rallying cry for the coming years.
We keep hearing that “data is the new oil”, but the difference between data and oil is that data doesn’t get burnt up; it’s endlessly copyable, can be reshaped and repurposed, and will tell you endless stories if you only let it.
At a time when we’re told that we’re tired of so-called experts, Rosling was one who stood on the side of the experts. What he demanded was that we should seek out the truth through the data that we can collect about the world around us, the world we experience, because that gets past our prejudices.
One of the best illustrations of his determination to bring us the truth came in an interview with a Danish journalist who insisted that the world was a place of chaos, war and terror.
Rosling edged towards anger: Boko Haram’s attacks don’t definie Nigeria, he insisted. “News outlets choose to only show a small piece, but you call it the world.” (Typically, his illustration of the reality of population was done by shifting apples around the table between him and the interviewer.)
He recognised that the data might be imperfect. But he insisted that the truth surfaces despite that.
“Many people say ‘Oh, the data is bad, that there are errors in it’,” he said in his TED talk. “But the differences [the data show] are bigger than the weaknesses of the data.”
That’s an important lesson, too: that you don’t necessarily have to be exact when you’re talking about significant differences.
Americans are shocked when you tell them that their child mortality rate and healthcare costs are completely out of kilter with the rest of the developed world – worse and more costly. Equally, Britons might be shocked to learn that our cancer survival rates are worse than Europe’s and America’s (according to the Concord study – though the figures may now be outdated);
Both challenge national preconceptions – that the US’s health insurance model, with its emphasis on competition, must lead to the cheapest and best outcomes, or in the UK that the NHS offers the best possible method of treatment.
Discovering facts or trends through the data doesn’t explain why they happen. But it will show you what you need to be looking at.
And in a world which seems to be reeling from dogmatic assertion of claims, whether about the risks from terrorists or the difficulty (or ease) of setting up trade deals, what we need more than ever are people who can show us the data, and help everyone to make sense of it.
We’ve lost Hans Rosling, but his inspiration will live on. The rest of us will just have do the best we can.
