The
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released six .xml files containing
1.1 million comments on its recently-released proposal dealing with net
neutrality to the public and invited them to crunch this data for them. Total data in the six files is 1.4 gigabytes.
According
to Bartees Cox, Deputy Press Secretary at the FCC:
“The
comments have always been available. Yesterday we took those comments, added to
them, and re-launched them in an open data format (XML). Because of the new
format 3rd parties can create data sets and other visualizations
from it. Hopefully by giving more people access to data in various ways, more
people will be able to take part in the comment and reply comment period.”
The files
themselves are available at:
http://www.fcc.gov/files/ecfs/14-28/ecfs-files.htm
Read more
in:
FCC Makes
Open Internet Comments More Accessible to Public
by: Gigi
B. Sohn, Special Counsel for External Affairs, Office
of the [FCC] Chairman, at:
As this
article is posted, no one has yet posted the results of a text analysis of this
data. A survey of the Big Data and
analytics ecosystem brings to light a number of companies, many associated as
partners of Amazon Web Services, who could easily data mine this trove of
public comment and surface the sentiments of those responding. A preview of what they might find has been
provided by Amy Schatz in an article entitled “FCC Gives Data Geeks New,
Exciting Way to Show Public’s Hatred of Net Neutrality Plan,” at:
Etopia
News will continue
its efforts to find a vendor who has run this project and corroborated or
refuted Ms. Schatz’ prediction of what intense computational processing of the
data will reveal. As she writes: “By Re/code’s
non-scientific review of selected comments filed, approximately 99.9 percent of
those comments appear to be some variation of ‘Tom Wheeler sucks.’”
Tom
Wheeler is FCC chairman and principal author of the proposal being commented on
1.1 million times.
No comments:
Post a Comment