Thinking Digital Conference: Gapminder Professor calls for more transparency

May 15 2009 by Andrew Mernin, The Journal

"We learned to put time on the X axis at school but that doesn’t give real understanding in the brain.

Rosling also used his presentation to call for a move for more transparency from Governments to share statistics with the public, which he says would encourage more entrepreneurial innovation.

He said: "We found that statistical data was not available any more. Stats are paid for by the tax payers so they should allowed freely on the net so innovators can add value and make it useful in all of its forms.

"These interfaces should be free to the whole world. We need things in a unified form so that everyone doesn’t have to spend a lot of time converting ideas.

"It would promote innovation if the Government took all the stats and made them available in one unified block.