Policymakers have been thinking a lot lately about how to improve the accuracy of economic performance indicators like the gross domestic product (GDP), which is to this day the dominant reference point for the progress of nations. Recently, the EU announced that they will launch a new indicator this year to measure environmental stress which will “reflect the pollution and environmental harm within the bloc’s member states, including aspects of climate change, biodiversity, air pollution, water use, and waste generation.”

As Stavros Dimas, the head of the environment directorate of the European Commission, said in the same New York Times article, “GDP, which measures short-term spending, was not traditionally intended to measure well-being. And it is not a sufficient guide for modern policymaking that takes social and environmental objectives into account. To change the world we need to change the way that we understand the world. And to do this we need to go beyond GDP.”

At the same time in France, President Sarkozy received the report he commissioned from Joseph Stiglitz a year ago when he named the Nobel Prize-winning economist head of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress; four other Nobel Prize Winners were also invited to join. This report presents identical conclusions to those reached by the European Union. “GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being, and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it an increasingly poor one.” A draft summary of the report is available on-line.

It’s always edifying to watch our government find better ways to understand our society and economy by analyzing indicators whose number and accuracy are continually increasing. Like companies, they are seeking a more precise image by analyzing data from an increasing number of sources and combining them in new ways. Does that remind you of anything? Of course. It’s all about business intelligence.

The story doesn’t say what systems will be used to include new data that feeds into the calculations for measuring well-being. Given the findings of several reports, however, open source certainly deserves a place since it helps unleash growth. We would, of course, be very proud to contribute to these calculations, particularly now that Talend has the experience, the solution, and the partner ecosystem needed to help them succeed in analyzing huge amounts of data.

Bertrand