I first saw the Gapminder tools Sunday night and emailed the usual suspects from around this weblog. A lot of you must read the same sources I do, because Tom got a couple of emails the next day asking if he had seen them yet.
I should have known Bradd Hayes would have already seen them. After all, he is Senior Director of Communications and Research at Enterra, the Editor of Steve DeAngelis' Enterprise Resilence Weblog, and long-time collaborator with Tom. In fact, he said:
1. He'd seen it several years ago.Gapminder is a 'non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development'. And despite how it rings for us, the name has no official connection to Tom's work:
2. He's prepared slides for Tom using that data base, and
3. He notes it in a draft of the Development-in-a-Box white paper.
Gapminder work are due to a feeling of filling a gap. There has been a market failure in distributing global data. A lot of people are interested in the data, but do not get access to it (if they manage to access the data, they need to be advanced skilled statisticans to analyse it). Gapminder want´s to make the data more accessible and easier to use for instant analysis. We belive decision makers, politicans as well as education about society at almost all levels lack adequate tools. We want to develop these tools.