Hi everyone!

I'm new on NetSquared and thought it might be a good idea to use this first post to introduce the work we're doing at UnLtdWorld around free, open and accessible data, hoping that many members of this community will find this of interest, especially those working on social entrepreneurship.

In parallel to fostering a community for social entrepreneurs, UnLtdWorld integrates a platform called the Research Lab, the world’s first mapping of social entrepreneurship to dynamically integrate into a social network. The Research Lab provides a breakdown of UnLtdWorld’s community, demographics and of all content on the site. The Research Lab also enables to visualise a breakdown of all data around a specific location or a member’s personal network. All data is of course anonymous

Last week we released a developer platform around our Research Lab, which basically makes all the data in the Research Lab accessible and dynamically usable. Through a set of APIs (and soon XML feeds aimed at non-developers), the developer platform will allow anyone to access all the data in the Research Lab for visualisations, comparative and historical analysis, and for real-time and dynamic use with other datasets, and within mash-ups and applications that can be deployed anywhere on the web.

For example someone could take public data or research around levels of awareness, crime rates, the provision of health services or education and mix these up with data fed from UnLtdWorld relevant to social entrepreneurs working on these issues or comparatively with interests, concerns, needs and skills in different locations, to visualize and comparatively analyse the outcomes and relations between datasets. A possible outcome could be to allow the assessment of “real” needs and identify possible gaps within service provision.

The goal is to help build the capacity of social entrepreneurship, and enhance the efficiency of relations and information sharing between social entrepreneurs, relevant stakeholders, such as policy makers and research, and the general public. The vision is to make social insight and context relevant to social entrepreneurship available and usable anywhere.

You can access the Research Lab and the developer platform at: http://unltdworld.com/lab/ (you need to sign into www.unltdworld.com and can use OpenID, Clickpass, Google, Facebook, Yahoo! or Microsoft Live to do this too).

I hope you find this of interest, and would love to discuss and explore possible connections with anyone working around data visualization and towards similar objectives.