ITU and Microsoft announce data visualisation project

At the recently concluded “Connect Africa” the ITU announced a partnership with Microsoft to produce ITU Global View, an online platform for tracking ICT development. It will be based on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and will allow for visual representation of data on ICT infrastructure and implementation. I’m sure this will be a very valuable tool for policy-makers, researchers and others. However, I’m somewhat disappointed that this will be built on a closed platform when perfectly viable open platforms, such as Google Earth, are available (for ex. see Gapminder recently acquired by Google).
The problem, as I see it, is that a closed platform will be controlled by, and fed by, institutions. Institutions necessarily generalise, simply because they cannot feasibly gather data that would be truly representative of all the imaginable levels of locality that are involved with their projects. Open platforms have shown that they are able to give individuals and communities a voice in a larger global community. We see this daily on blogs, wikis, social bookmarking sites and other open platforms. The sort of granularity that an open platform could provide would be far more interesting in a project like this.
For example, take a look at the Google Earth (American Cell Tower Density) visualisation posted here. That’s some pretty interesting info. However, the visualisation is broken down into sectors. So, we don’t know about cellular blind spots within those sectors, which might be very helpful. But, far more helpful and informative would be visual representations of the actual signal strength on a granular localised level. Then we might be able to look and say, “There are a lot of people in that spot right there that say they don’t get a signal. Why not?”
But, even more importantly is that communities and individuals can develop their own data representations, telling the world what they want them to hear, rather than what one of many international institutions decide to collect data on.