In reply to Greg Brown.

Hi Greg,

I have to say that I find it ironic that we are here debating about Open Data in an Open Source project :-)

Agree with you, sure there's some work involved in order to prepare/clean/anonymize the data, but it's a one-time investment so that other external resources (ie non-devs) can help out in analyzing the data. I think we are really looking at different profiles in terms of skill-set. (Btw, I did not say we should dump data indiscriminately. I simply meant that data dumps once established can be automated, unlike development of new features in core.)

Concerning the second part of your answer, thanks for the info about Calypso. So I guess that some people use data after all :-)

Totally agree that analyzing data is not a zero effort, but again we are looking at different skill sets. I wouldn't dare playing with core, but I have no problems with data. I guess the same is true for many other people in the community.

Agree with you about user feedback and using other methods, and I don't see any contradiction between those methods and Open Data, they are not mutually exclusive (assuming the right anonymity is in place etc etc).