OpenEI - Uncovering the Lost Ark

Cover via Amazon

The OpenEI blog spends a lot of time telling you what you can find at OpenEI.org, how to find it, and what will be coming soon to OpenEI. However, we don't spend a lot of time discussing exactly what we are, how we've changed, and what that change will mean for our future.

We are sponsored by the United States Department of Energy. We are a project seeking to make energy information, data, and visualizations accessible, and seeking to build a community around these visualizations.

We don't want to brand ourselves as one particular thing, such as an app that you can use to estimate PV installation costs, or a place to gather datasets related to RE/EE technologies. But its important for us and our community to know what we are, and where we're going.

Take, for instance, our "elevator-pitch":

"OpenEI is a powerful, collaborative platform that is helping government and industry leaders around the world define policy options, make informed investment decisions, and create new business. Remember the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark was hidden away in a government warehouse? That’s like a typical data collection effort—take something with the power to transform our understanding of the world and lock it away. OpenEI is different. OpenEI uses the power of crowdsourcing to create a brand new energy data set, and provides mapping and other visualization tools to transform that raw data into understanding. We’re not about collecting data. We’re about sharing data in ways that transform understanding. As we grow and attract more collaborators from across the U.S. government and beyond, OpenEI will help demonstrate DOE’s global leadership in energy matters."

This describes the larger story and OpenEI's place in data collection. Data is out there, but it can be hard to gather data in one place. OpenEI continues to gather data across many reliable sources. Around that data collection, OpenEI is trying to build a community of users that can share comments, rate, and even edit pages that are related to data.

Its important to be aware of our government affiliation. Some may wonder why a private entity couldn't succeed in doing the same thing OpenEI is trying to do. Well, all are welcome to access open data, but OpenEI hopes to be the facilitator of open energy data to all. We take no proprietorship over any of our data and visualizations.

But what to do with all this data? Not everyone cares about accessing datasets. Some people just want to find the meaning through visualization. In some ways, this is more important than the data collection itself. Consumers are groomed to get restaurant advice in Austin, Texas, or find a gas station while driving aross I-80 in Nebraska, all in a matter of seconds. But most aren't interested in looking at a dataset. Data visualization is how you interact with a larger community, and that interaction is invaluable to OpenEI.