Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) argues that sharing raw data is important for society. Inspired by a post by Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation his call to action is "Raw Data Now", meaning that everyone should demand that governments and businesses share the data they collect as raw data. He points out that "data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives… because somebody takes the data and does something with it." To Berners-Lee, it is essentially from this sharing of raw data, that advances in science will emerge. Advocates of open data argue that once citizens and civil society organizations have access to data from businesses and governments, it will enable citizens and NGOs to do their own analysis of the data, which can empower people and civil society. For example, a government may claim that its policies are reducing the unemployment rate, but a poverty advocacy group may be able to have its staff econometricians do their own analysis of the raw data, which may lead this group to draw different conclusions about the data set.
