For those of you who haven’t been following the debate between Tim O’ Reilly and Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio, the point of contention is whether open data should have quality controls in place like open-source software does. I come down on DiMaio’s side that, generally speaking “you cannot run an open data project like an open source project.” As he points out, government data, especially, is not conducive to the community-development model that exists around open-source projects; any community model to add value or accuracy would have to be done post-release. But assuming it’s accurate, the tools are emerging to help us make sense out of large, open data sets regardless of how shiny they are.