February 18 - 20, 2009
John Ellenberger has presented a paper at the NTTS (New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics). The authors of the paper are John Ellenberger and Stuart Muir, Symbolix Pty Ltd.
Abstract
National Statistics Offices (NSOs) are under increasing demand to provide greater access to official statistics for their key stakeholders and the public at large. Timely, relevant, and robust statistics are recognised as fundamental economic and social measures of an economy’s performance.
Historically, NSOs have done well in servicing public users with aggregated statistics: however the needs of more demanding users, researchers, policy makers and analysts tend to be met through clumsy data laboratories or expensive custom table production systems.
This group of “Prosumers”, while being small in number, tends to be the greatest user of statistics and the ones who are faced with lack of access to detailed statistics. Hans Rosling from the Gapminder Foundation is considered a quintessential Prosumer.
This paper focuses on the rise of Prosumers and the ways in which providers of statistics are beginning to service their needs. We are beginning to see a greater recognition of the role of the Prosumer, who takes statistics and turns them into
interesting stories for policy makers.
We will consider the key challenges and opportunities that NSOs face in servicing this evolving market. New confidentiality routines, new Internet based applications
allowing users to query Micro-data, faster tabulation engines to cope with large databases and above all an increasing recognition of the role Prosumers play in the statistical value chain removes the barriers associated with servicing Prosumers while still ensuring that the privacy of respondents and integrity of the data is preserved.
Keywords: Micro-data, Confidentiality, Dissemination
The paper and the presentation are published on the NTTS website.