It’s nothing profound to say we’re at the beginning of a data democracy era. Access to more data, by more people, in more ways. This week the theme of democratizing data emerged from all corners of the tech community, the biggest story being around the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 and its 239 passengers. Over 200 million volunteers have joined the hunt thanks to DigitalGlobe, which on Monday launched a crowdsourcing campaign calling for people to help search for the missing airliner.

I’ll pose this question to you: if 200 million volunteers joined the hunt for a missing flight that had only (I say that humbly) 239 passengers, what the heck is stopping us from tackling other issues?

While you ponder that, here’s a recap of this week’s top stories.

Crowdsourcing the hunt for Malaysian Airlines flight 370

As the hunt goes on for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 and its 239 passengers continues, plenty of questions have been asked about how, in this day and age, a plane can simply vanish into thin air. We might not have the answers right now, but it’s not for the lack of trying. Thanks to the help of one US satellite company, more than two million people have now joined the effort to locate the missing plane.

Your U.S. government uses open source software, and loves it

Writing the words “government” and “open source“ in the same sentence feels inherently wrong, almost as if lying. Recent talk of the NSA, Edward Snowden, and PRISM doesn’t make the government seem any more “open”. The government carries the stigma as being on of the least “open” things in the world. Yet contrary to popular belief, the government is using open source as a tool to improve agencies on the back-end and save tax dollars.

How Star Citizen catapulted from a $500k Kickstarter into a $40 million project

Chris Roberts, the creative mind behind Wing Commander decided to take the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter to raise the money for his next project Star Citizen, a very ambitious game idea he had. Star Citizen debuted on Kickstarter in late 2012 seeking just $500,000. When its funding period closed it had raised more than $2m from 34,000 people. This has since swelled to over $40 million as the game’s publicity and popularity expanded–and with that has the promises made by Chris Roberts and his studio.

Wise.io bags $2.5M to democratize predictive analytics

Despite the amount of analytics available, or maybe because of, it takes an army of data scientists—and a lot of physical infrastructure—to uncover actionable insights at the enterprise level. Wise.io wants to change that with a cloud-based, predictive analytics platform that allows customers to hit the ground running. The platform allows them to scale their algorithms as needed, without large upfront capital expenditures on data center equipment. The startup promises to not only take the hassle out of deployment but also let CIOs make “true machine intelligence” accessible to the non-technical users who drive the bottom line.

With GemFire XD, Pivotal closes the Big Data analytics loop

The team at Pivotal made a handful of announcements this week focused on the Big Data and analytics layer of its enterprise platform play. One such announcement was the general availability of GemFire XD, in which its in-memory GemFire database is now able to – like HAWQ – run on Pivotal HD. The company is betting big on its grand vision of a data layer that, among other things, allows for not just Big Data application development, but (as it calls it) Fast Data applications, including transactional applications.

City of Paradigm: The Big Data DevOps of customers and user experience

In the latest excerpt from The City of Paradigm, a novel by our own Kyt Dotson, Isabelle “Bell” Elune Wolfe, the daughter of Steven Wolfe from the previous excerpt— is a gamer who is a beta tester for a mobile app. With that scene set, it seemed prudent to reach out to an outfit that right now is working on big data analytics solutions for gaming apps to talk about gaming and data. To shed some light on this SiliconANGLE contacted Kazuki Ohta, Founder and CTO of Treasure Data.

And there you have it. How is your bracket doing? Both your #MarchMadness and #CUBEMadness brackets!