> “I’m astonished by the number of people apparently just waiting for our data to become free,” says Shaida Badiee, director of the bank’s economic development data group. “I had no idea how big a deal this was going to be.”
Free is different. Personally, I'm always surprised when some person or group radically lowers barriers to participation and then express shock when they get run over by a herd of contributors. And this from economists, too! You would think they would be especially sensitive to transaction costs and dead-weight loss! (Even tech types like Eliezer Yudkowsky make this mistake.)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/bj6
For more about the tech behind the site, see http://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/apr/20/world-bank-open-...
On the other hand, it was the WB's incompetence that motivated me to learn Python and write my first script, to scrape their website and get their data to a more useful and less slow format (mind that I did had a paid subscription at that time)
In my opinion, this leads to a disconnect in that the people who would be exposing the data via APIs likely don't have the understanding of how the data might be processed as it isn't a part of their business function.
Long-term IT contracts typically bridge that gap eventually, which I am only guessing is how they're able to expose the data effectively now, if in fact they can.
