Not long ago, I had shared an announcement with my colleagues in the national statistics office (NSO) that I’m currently working with, “Data.WorldBank.org Launched Today on Drupal”. In that announcement, more than the ‘Data’ part, I was excited for the ‘Drupal’ part, as I had recently developed the entire Intranet stack in the NSO with Drupal, and I was hoping to garner some critical support for it by showcasing its strength with data/statistics. But, little did I know that I was soon going to shift my attention from the ‘Drupal’ part to the ‘Data’ part.

Some days later, I saw an update about an event in my Google Reader, “UK-wide teen hackathon, Aug 2-6: Young Rewired State”, and it said, “During the first week of August, Young Rewired State will again show what groups of talented young coders can do with Government data. Young developers will spend the week at centres held at businesses and organisations across the UK, working with established tech teams, mentors and visiting experts making apps, websites, games and visualisations….”

This is revolutionary! People can use government data that is openly available and create tools, applications, and mash-ups based on it, as gapminder.org puts it, “unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world view”.

Then, someone directed me to two wonderful sites: http://data.gov.uk/ and http://www.data.gov/ and today, I read an article on huffingtonpost.com, “Gov 2.0 Growing Globally and Fast”.

This and all that led me to think, something interesting is happening on the data front!

Coming from the ICT4D field, it was my constant endeavour to establish the connection between the ethoses of ICT4D with statistics – an area with which I recently got associated closely. And here it is – the Interplay amongst information, connectedness and devices – in full swing!