Kudos to David Eaves for his 10 June 2010 blog post, Learning from Libraries: The Literacy Challenge of Open Data. David addresses the concern that (my paraphrase) “people will hurt themselves with all of that data out there.” From his post:

We didn’t build libraries for a literate citizenry. We built
libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data
portals not because we have public policy literate citizens, we build
them so that citizens may become literate in public policy.

If you have any concerns about open data, or concerns about concerns over open data, David’s post is essential reading.

David Eaves leads the open data collaborative effort datadotgc.ca. He recently presented on Open Data, Baseball and Government [video] at the O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Expo conference.