DIY Data Science

In a comment on yesterday's hobbyist post, Pete Griffiths offered "Do It Yourself Data Science" and I really liked that suggestion for a bunch of reasons.

I think data science and machine learning (I know they are not the same thing) are going to be a very big part of tech innovation in the coming years. And I also know that putting powerful tools in the hands of "everyman" produces more innovation than can happen when the tools are limited to mathematicians and scientists.

The blogging revolution in publishing is a great example of this. Once everyone could have a printing press, we got to see many important developments that did not and would not have happened as long as publishing was a high cost operation limited to professionals.

So what is the Tumblr or Blogger or WordPress of data science? When will my son and his friends be able to take the NBA dataset and start running algorithms against it to produce better fantasy picks? When will my daugther and her friends be able to take the TV viewing dataset to decide what TV shows to go back and watch that they missed last year?

I believe data science is going to go mainstream in the coming years. What will be the platform(s) that make that happen?