An additional way of thinking

I have been reflecting on why I was unsuccessful with my advocacy of automatic open records. This will take some time to work through, but as I make discoveries I will post them here.

One aspect that is becoming clearer is that my deep understanding of data, informed by 30 years of computational thinking and practice, is so natural to me that I did not address educating others. When I posted here good examples of open government I often did not explain how what was done addressed the fundamentals of what I was advocating.

One of the fundamentals is about data. Data has identity (an "address" at never changes), granularity (levels of detail and/or composition), and relationships (to data inside and data outside the system). Data is mostly available but sometimes it is missing. Data is mostly consistent but sometimes it is inconsistent. All these dimensions and their management are in play in my mind all the time. But I am not overwhelmed by this complexity nor the weight of the volume of data. I have the necessary skills to abstract, compartmentalize, and conquer the problem. This kind of mindfulness is not how most people think.

It is the mindfulness of the computer scientist. You can't use this name in public discourse, however. The public perception of a computer scientist, if any, is either someone who knows how to get their laptop to print or some esoteric mathematician. Neither of these perceptions encompass what is at the core of computer science. That core is problem solving and whole bunch of algorithms and data structures to be used systematically to approach problem solutions.

Within computer science there is the new discipline of Computational Thinking. This was kicked off in Jeannette Wings's manifesto. This essay is written for computer scientists so don't bother reading it -- just yet. Instead, listen to Jon Udell's interview with (South Kingstown's own) Joan Peckham.