Virginia Carlson of the Metro Chicago Information Center is attending the Strata Conference for the second time, and stopped by theCube with John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. She shared her take on an area that hasn’t been addressed all that much in our big data coverage: exactly how the public center fits in the picture. Carlson elaborated.

The MCIC is a non-profit company that was founded over 20 years ago to carry out the task of taking 3,000 household surveys per year. The organization then moved on to aggregating open government data, and currently operates as a big data ‘funnel,’ in Carlson’s words.  She says that the firm curates and visualizes data that may be of use to other public groups, and provided the example of a Native America healthcare center looking for the optimal location to open up a new clinic. But in the big data era MCIC is encountering a new issue – the private sector’s ‘data hoarding,’ as Furrier calls it.

Carlson’s take is that, because data is becoming a business model, companies such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are holding on to valuable information about their users. This means that the data is not available for entities that could leverage it for the common good.

This data-chocking is apparently also going on in the public sector itself, according to Carlson. She says that while the open data initiative in the federal government makes operational and administrative details much more transparent for the public, it deflects attention from historical and statistical records. Carlson and her organization, as well the companies it serves make use of this data, which is becoming more and more scarce accessibility-wise.

Overall, the interview was a very engaging one that sheds new light on this megatrend. For of Carlson’s insight check out the video below.