If you remember, Eric Raymond in the Cathedral and the Bazaar floated the "many eyeballs" theory that all bugs are shallow if you have a large enough community involved in finding solutions. I also remember that Tim O'Reilly in his seminal paper What is Web 2.0 identified some of the important differences between Web 1.0 and Web2.0, among which a key one in my view was participation. In the early days of the web, we were passive consumers of data. Web 2.0 brought Wikipedia, where users contributed as well as consumed information. Like Wikipedia the new paradigm has become so successful that wikis are now ubiquitous and the advantage of involving users in creating and maintaining data has been demonstrated over and over. A now classic example is OpenStreetMap. Most recently Google has realized that users are "remarkable data sources themselves", and Google Maps and Google Earth have a new tool that lets you the user report errors in Google's maps. There is a new menu item "Report a Problem" that allows you to suggest edits, like a new highway on-ramp, new names of parks or buildings, and so on. Google promises to vet the edit within a month and if you submit your email address, they'll keep you posted on their progress.
I have blogged about the poor quality of network facility data in utilities and telecom and about how critical up to date reliable network facility data is going to be for the smart grid. Many years ago I was struck by the simple low tech way Brad Lawrence of ENMAX Power Corp addressed the data quality problem. He guaranteed field staff a 24 hour turnaround on all updates from the field by instructing records staff to give updates from the field highest priority. A subsequent audit by an external auditor, in which a field survey sampled a subset of ENMAX's database and compared it to what was actually in the field, reported 99.6% reliability for ENMAX's outside plant database. For an industry in which 40-70% data accuracy is typical, this struck me as a remarkable achievement. What Brad did was to empower field staff by enabling them to be participants in maintaining asset data.
Google Maps and Google Earth have provided a simple online tool that can be used by the user community (typically field staff in the case of utilities) to report errors and changes in network facility data. In the case of utilities that provide open access to assset data like North Shore City in New Zealand, not only field staff, but citizens could become active participants in maintaining utility asset data. Given the long history of poor quality asset data in utilities, it seems to me that a radically new approach along the lines of what Google Maps has done is a promising way to achieve and maintain the level of data quality that we need to make the the promise of the smart grid a reality.
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