Yesterday I read a great post by Nat Torkington over at Radar O’Reilly.  It really got my juices flowing.  I’ve been thinking a lot about Data, especially data in the cloud/open data in advance of my presentation with Michael Klein at Code4Lib at the end of the month (holy crap its coming fast).

When I saw the post I printed it out (i know…the trees) and started marking it up.  This morning when I came back into the office I took a look at the paper and realized that most of the ideas that I liked were basically screaming “I’m a project!”  Some of the highlights from the post were:

• create a user-base for your data
• market to that user-base
• think about publishing your data at the beginning of the project
• consider the sustainability of publishing your data
• think about what you’re hoping to accomplish with your open data
• who are you targeting by opening up your data
• build your project based on what you want to accomplish and who you’re targeting

None of these points are really that new to me (or to anyone that works in systems).  You need to plan before starting on a project, and if you plan right you can have an awesome project.  I think planning is what makes data.gov.uk so much better than data.gov.  It was well thought out.  They considered user-bases in advance.  They incorporated RDF into the data catalogue (yes that’s the british spelling…we are talking about a british site afterall).  These little subtleties are what people are the most excited about.

At the same time I recognize that a lot of times we’re working with retrospective data, data that we thought no one would ever want to take a look at.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it useful now, and data.gov.uk proves that. Through great planning they created a very useful tool.

So my point is PLAN PLAN PLAN.  A well thought out plan can make a project succeed or fall flat.