True open data advocates all know that you can't trust the "open" data sources from city, county, state, and federal government anymore. For a period of about 10 years, these sources of open data were valuable, growing, and provided fuel for a new way for society to function. However in 2031, everyone knows that these sources of data are just useless trash piles of bad data, obsolete file and data formats, and just a toxic byproduct of a broken government.
While this evolution in open data is unfortunate, one positive side effect is that it has spawned a more valuable, passionate community of librarians, and data activists centered around making change using open data. By default, almost every library across the United States, and in most western countries, possesses a robust open data catalog, and library patron driven open data community.
It seems that open data and transparency was never really in the DNA of the enterprise, government, and even startups, but is something that was well suited for mixing with the existing DNA of the library community. Librarians have always been curators, and protectors of the worlds knowledge in the physical world, and is something that seems to be occurring in this new digital world we have engineered for ourselves.
