Some late-night thoughts about the data toolbox. We’d like to have a pick-list of tools that people find useful for big and open data. But if we do that, we risk having a giant unsorted list of tools that completely overwhelms anyone coming to the site for the first time.
Much better would be a toolbox that had personal suggestions – e.g. “fred likes using these tools (and Fred is a politics specialist with a love of visualization)”. Which sounds much like Amazon’s Listmania system for marking up and collecting together books.
We could even have wishlists: I’d like an open-source tool that does x. And we could use the same voting systems that go into Hunchworks to bump tools up and down the list of ones the community would like developed next.