Hans Rosling's 2006 TED talk about how data can tell the important stories about how we can make the world a better place remains one of the most inspiring talks that I have seen on the conference's video archive.
Hans demonstrates the main thrust of his argument before he identifies it by showing a lively series of animations that illustrate trends of global poverty, life expectancy, family sizes, and GDP. With his charismatic narration that contextualizes the social policies put into effect by the countries as we watch the animations play out, we observe the demonstrable benefits that changes in a society's economic or health policies can have for its people over time.
After what is, in my estimation, a very convincing demonstration of the power of data, he makes what is essentially a call to arms to designers and developers of software to help continue his work of bringing important information that social scientists have collected out from the databases in many public and private institutions and out to the public, so that they might sort, search and compare data sets in an engaging, fun(!) way. In its current incarnation, SPSS is most definitely not "fun."
I think that this work could potentially be important for the future of civic discussion. Empirically based social policy might be easier to demonstrate and build support for if a trusted and well know set of tools such as these were readily available, even if it also means an occasional conspiracy theorist / freakenomics professor might also use the tools to find silly nonsensical, correlations. If my visions of grand pretense that I posit above never materialize, I would still love to play with, or build, those tools.
I know that WolframAlpha does many of the things that Hans describes, but that tool requires a bit of specialized knowledge and syntax magic to wield. There is allegedly an API, however, so this could be the start of some sort of project. I will need to investigate his MindTheGap project further and perhaps view his followup talks to see how things have progressed.
