Eli Malinsky (Centre for Social Innovation) and I had coffee recently. Before we got down to business, we started talking about our favourite television shows. We quickly found out that we both appreciate HBO’s the Wire. Omar is Eli’s favourite character. Freeman is mine.
Here is what I like about Freeman’s character: Episode after episode, you will see Freeman patiently peering under a magnifying glass with his wood working tools creating some little toy while waiting for the bad guys to make a call and activate the ‘wire tap’.
It was boring work. But it was critical to make the case.
His other colleagues were often out on the street, cracking heads and making arrests. Freeman was assigned to the tedious grunt work.
Freeman also spent a lot of time searching for patterns in loosely organized pieces of crime reports, maps, the banking statements of criminals, suspect photos and property development information.
In several episodes you would see him sitting there, silently, looking at the collage on the wall. He’d sit there, hour after hour, day after day waiting for the pattern to emerge. This method Freeman’s colleagues to no end: they wanted immediate results.
However after time, patterns would emerge. The gangsters operated more sophisticatedly than the police gave them credit for. Their techniques more thought out than police suspected. And unsuspecting accomplices were keeping their exploits hidden.
In our offices, we also like to look at a lot of seemingly random data, stats and stories. We, like Freeman, often post them on a board or wall or into a GChat. Often it is a bunch of random stuff about the nonprofit sector. Sometimes it’s simply “Hey have you seen this?”. In doing so, we see a few patterns emerge. We’ll be blogging about a few of these patterns in the next few weeks, but the one that is most promising is the open-data/open-architecture movement.
We think there is massive opportunities in our space. We’re also happy to see more buzz around Social Enterprise and will be connecting the docs on seemingly random stories that relate to both areas.
Feel free to share your observations with us; collecting information from all sources is the best way to solve a case.
