The Open Cricket Manifesto
by Devanshu Mehta
Here is what I want
1. A regularly updated free, open database of cricket statistics. Let’s unpack that.
- Free: Free as in free beer. No cost.
- Free: Free as in freedom. No strings attached.
- Open: Open as in open source, open standards.
2. An open data format for the interchange of cricket statistical data among fans, companies, software and web services.
3. A set of software tools to help create awesome visualizations of the data, and powerful search interfaces in to the data.
What statistics would this contain?
Insofar as they are available, such a resource would have:
- The outcome of every ball of every international match ever played.
- In aggregate, this would provide the career statistics and match records of every international match ever played.
Why?
Cricket statistics are not legally owned by media companies, but this is effectively the situation we find ourselves in today. Sure there is Cricinfo’s StatsGuru. And there are independent purveyors of statistical databases (built in MS Access, don’t get me started). But if we ever want to jump-start an academic, amateur or fandom analysis of the game, we need better data and better tools (see retrosheet).
With that in mind, I hereby announce the Open Cricket Project. Details to follow. If you would like to contribute, post a comment below, on twitter, or email deepbackwardpoint@galaxyfaraway.com.
Deep Backward Point 
This would be a tough project, but I would love to contribute. Cricinfo’s Statsguru is where I have gone when in dire need of stats (of course when I’m so bored and have no life), and to make something better than that is a tough ask. Peace out! 🙂
Thanks. It’s not only tough, it’s perhaps impossible. But the goal is not to make something better. It’s to make something transparent, open, free.
I wholeheartedly agree that we need this, and I’d love to be involved. I’ve had ideas for improvements that I could have made to the Cricsheet data, but working at it by myself has put obvious constraints on the possibility of doing this. Having an open project would be wonderful.