since 1996. Such growth might be manageable if the costs of handling each requests was dropping  
rapidly, but it has more than quadrupled. 
Unfortunately, alternatives like charging for access to data or cutting the budget for providing them  
to citizens remain very common in spite of their negative effects. According to Eaves, the first  
practice has already caused a reduction in the number of freedom of information requests filed by  
citizens, while budget cuts invariably and greatly delay processing times. 
3.2. Creative, unforeseen uses of local Open Data increase
Proofs that, as cited in the Open Data, Open Society report, "Data is like soil", that is valuable not  
in itself, but because of what  grows on it, often in ways that the landowner couldn't imagine,  
continue to arrive. Here is an example from  Day Two: Follow the Data, Iterating and the $1200  
problem: 
Ed Reiskin noticed a problem with street cleaning. Some trucks would go out, coming 
back with little or no trash depending on the day and route they took. After getting the 
tonnage logs, his team quickly realized that changing certain routes and reducing 
service on others would save money (less gas, parts, labor) and the environment (less 
pollution, gas consumption, water). A year later, the department realized a little over a 
million dollars in savings. The point? Follow the data. 
The value embedded in data isn't only economical or political, but also social. Here are a few  
examples. 
At the Amsterdam fire brigade, once a fire alarm starts, all sorts of data is collected , to maximize  
the probabilities to save lives and property, about the location and the route to the emergency:  
constructions on the way, latest updates from OpenStreetMap, the type of house and if possible  
more data such as construction dates, materials, people living there and so on. 
Using  the  geographical  coordinates  embedded  in  online  photo  databases  like  Flickr,  digital 
cartographer Eric Fischer creates maps that highlight people behavior. For example, he documented  
how, in Berlin, most locals tend to stay in the same neighborhoods and don't go to West Berlin or to  
the outskirts of the city. This information has economic value, journalist Kayser-Bril noted: "You 
can then sell this for instance to businessmen who want to open a shop in Berlin for tourists, and  
telling them where to go and where not to go." 
Norwegian transport company Kolumbus has embedded 1,200 bus stops with barcodes in the square 
QR format, that can encode text or URLs. Scanning those codes with a free software application for  
smartphones loads a website that lists upcoming bus departure times. Later, Kolumbus  partnered 
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Copyright  2011 LEM, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. This work is released under a Creative Commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)