The authors have been conducting observatory research on the opportunities and challenges of open source social media data in the context of social sciences.
The time lag is overcome with the use of open source social media data where people 'report' their own health conditions yet the validity and credibility of the data is minimized.
Yet another, known as Open Source Indicators, analyzes social media data to "anticipate and/or detect significant societal events, such as political crises [and] riots".
Open source communications, such as social media data, lend themselves to this purpose given their inherent fine-grained temporal characteristics.
Soldiers' social media data has allowed open-source journalism sites like Bellingcat to expose secret military activity by Russian forces, sometimes in real time.
New financial technology companies are using social media data to help people get access to credit or even simply open a bank account.
It opens up Open Media dialogue.
Between active citizens and an active media, open data created by the people in the absence of a good government data reporting structure is already having an impact.
Like social media, open data by itself is just a tool.
In his talk, Brian Forde, Senior Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer at the White House, spoke of the need to harness social media and open government data to better inform policy makers, survivors and first responders with actionable information.
Klout measures the influence of social-media users (some firms give people with a high Klout score preferential treatment).Having a marketplace such as DataSift has already encouraged other social-media services to open their data vaults, says Nick Halstead, the founder of DataSift.
