Author: Tom Slee

When Theories Matter: Uprisings in Authoritarian States

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(Second in a series of hopefully accessible posts about this hard-to-read paper).

From time to time, sitting in a comfortable chair with a cup of coffee reading disputes about Twitter Revolts and Facebook Revolutions, it is easy to think that The Argument is the Thing. But it isn't, of course. The public profile of these debates about how digital technologies intertwine with dissent in authoritarian states, sprawling from the pages of the New Yorker to Foreign Policy, from specialized academic journals to urgent pamphlets, means that the arguments may influence the choices of dissidents operating in perilous environments; may sway them one way or another as they make life-changing decisions. So the least we can do, even those of us on the fringes of the debates, is to try for the truth.

Particularly strange, perhaps, is that these disputes are unavoidably theoretical. Of course, it matters greatly to tell a coherent and accurate story of how events played out in each particular case, but the implications of the debates are most urgent for uprisings that have not yet happened and for protests that have not yet been organized. No matter how exhaustively one recounts the unfolding of events in Tunisia in 2011 and 2012, such a telling alone cannot provide guidance to dissidents in Azerbaijan, in Russia, or in Canada for that matter. We cannot avoid theory: we point to a set of mechanisms and say "this happened here because of these conditions and for these reasons. In other conditions in different places, here are the possible outcomes". Talk turns inevitably to what is primary and what is mere epiphenomenon. We tell stories that highlight what seems essential and draw attention away from the factors that we deem unimportant. We theorize, and we tell stories based on those theories. We retell anecdotes that encapsulate those theories to prove our points.

When it comes to questions of digital technologies and their roles in political change, and particularly dissent in authoritarian states, there is a whole vocabulary that has come into being that carries along a set of narratives. There are assumptions behind terms such as "digital activist", "internet freedom", and "network society" that carry over into the stories and the habitual grooves of thought that we take with us as we try to understand new developments.

One current that has been particularly influential in the debates around the "Arab Spring" uprisings is based on the idea of informational cascades, and this current provides the theory behind much of the optimistic talk about Facebook revolutions and the potential for digital technologies to undermine authoritarian regimes. It's not the only theory of uprisings, but it is a compelling one. So if you're going to tell a different story about digital technologies, you need a different theory. I went looking for what that theory should be, and didn't find one, so I put one together myself, and that's what these posts are about.

Next: a look at information cascades and what they leave out.

Writing Towards Zero

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Five months have passed since I posted here because I found myself drawn to finishing an earlier project. I thought it would take a couple of weeks but it ended up taking five months. The end result is called "Identity, Institutions, and Uprisings", is available at SSRN, and over the next few weeks I'm going to provide a more accessible, more political, and less academic version of the project here. I suspect the potential audience is vanishingly small but hey, I'm pleased with it. I'll start tomorrow.

Open Data at Crooked Timber

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Prompted by the flurry of activity around here, Henry Farrell of the highly-regarded Crooked Timber blog has organized a seminar on Open Data. In Timber-speak a seminar is a series of posts over the course of a week or so by a variety of guest bloggers, together with comments from the CT crowd, who are a very smart crowd indeed. So I'm thrilled at the seminar, and even more thrilled to be the first contributor; my contribution is Seeing Like a Geek.

Open Data Movement Redux: Tribes and Contradictions

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1 Introduction

I have two things to say to those who responded to Why the ‘Open Data Movement’ is a Joke:

  1. Thank you for putting so much effort into providing such thoughtful, reflective, articulate affirmations of your point of view. You gave me (and others, I hope) a lot to think about, and a lot to read over the last several days.
  2. Unfortunately, you’re still wrong.

The original post was written in the heat of the moment, so here is a more detailed and considered, and therefore almost certainly less-likely-to-be-read, argument about the contradictions and problems of the “Open Data Movement”.

2 The Open Government Data Landscape

First, here is a map of Open-Government-Dataland (click for a larger popup).

Ogdlandscape

The longitude, marked across the x axis, indicates the impact of the data itself. The line x=0 is the Yu-Robinson Meridian1 and separates Open-Government-Dataland into an eastern and a western hemisphere, each populated by a spectrum of data. Harlan Yu and David G. Robinson explain the hemispheres this way:

“A machine-readable bus schedule aims to promote convenience, commerce and a higher quality of life—it enhances service delivery. Disclosures of public contracting opportunities play a dual role, potentially enhancing both economic opportunity and public integrity. And core civic data, such as legislative or campaign finance information, serves a more purely civic role, enhancing transparency.”

Tom Lee describes these two hemispheres as “‘open-as-in-data.gov’ and ‘open-as-in-FOIA'”.

The latitude, marked along the y axis, marks the incentive of the data users. Travelling from south to north along a meridian takes us from the purely commercial activities in the south to the purely non-commercial in the relatively poor northern lands. At y=0 we cross the Bates Parallel, named after Jo Bates who has this to say about the conflict between the commercial and non-commercial hemispheres:2

“Interviews and observations suggest that some at the periphery of the OGD [Open Government Data] initiative have tended to conceptualise OGD as being about small start-ups, voluntary ‘civic hackers’, and other micro/small enterprises. This is unsurprising given the heavy weighting towards micro/small businesses in the UK’s IT sector and the large number of ‘civic hackers’ active in the OGD community; however, the potential re-user industry for OGD is broader than this. The PSI [Public Sector Information] re-use industry comprises a range of industries and includes multinational corporations (MNCs) such as Google and LexisNexis, conglomerates such as Daily Mail and General Trust whose DMG information division is the parent company of the UK based Landmark Information Group, as well as an array of SMEs, micro enterprises, independent developers, and voluntary ‘civic hackers’.”

While this landscape is rich, the inhabitants of different quadrants of the map can be distinguished easily:

  • In the harsh mountains of the North-West3 live the hardy non-commercial “civic hackers” whose diet consists of transit timetables, weather forecasts, and other pragmatic, useful data obtained, often piece-by-piece, from municipal governments. The culture of the civic hackers displays a combination of civic goals and enjoyment in the intrinsic interest of programming, with a twist of start-up mentality. It is a tribe described vividly by David Eaves4: “geek, technically inclined, leaning left, and socially minded. There are many who don’t fit that profile, but that is probably the average.” This tribe includes organizations such as Code for America (“A new kind of public service”) as well as small and loosely-coordinated groups of individuals working at a local level and who identify with their role as citizens over their role as consumers.
  • The North-Eastern tundra is the home of civil liberties activists, a resourceful tribe bent on promoting government transparency. It is driven by a desire to make information such as lobbying activities, campaign funding, government operations, and legal statutes open and accessible. In the USA you will find organizations such as Sunlight Foundation (“Making Government Transparent and Accountable”) and Public.Resource.Org (“Making Government Information More Accessible”) living here. Tom Lee’s response5 and Carl Malamud’s comments hail from these lands.
  • In the warmer lowlands of the South-East, food is a little more plentiful. Here you can find a long-nosed tribe of commercial organizations and individuals who get paid to hold government accountable: the tribe of “data-driven journalists” which focuses on working with data to carry out its function.
  • Finally, by far the most comfortable quadrant in the land is the lush pastures of the South-West, where a tribe of comfortable and well-nourished commercial organizations lives. Some members of this tribe are small and fast moving, but others have grown to giant size and sport odd names such as Google, Microsoft, or ESRI. One member of this tribe, Socrata, wrote another retort to my post of last week.

Not everyone lives in a single spot; some organizations are nomadic, wandering from quadrant to quadrant. As just one example, mySociety in the UK has both a commercial and a charitable wing; it runs both transparency-oriented projects such as They Work For You, and service-oriented projects such as Mapumental, which is a commuter-mapping service offered as a commercial product. O’Reilly Media lives in the South-West, but Alex Howard (a member of that tribe) spends considerable time in the South East.6

3 Open Data: Is it a Movement?

I hope the geography tour is pretty uncontroversial, and that it helps to orient ourselves with respect to the three claims I made last week about the “Open Data Movement”:

  1. It’s not a movement in a political or cultural sense of the word.
  2. It’s doing nothing for transparency and accountability in government.
  3. It’s co-opting the language of progressive change in pursuit of a small-government-focused subsidy for industry.

Of these three, I stand by about two and a half, although I do agree that the wording is sloppy and could be misleading. In my defense, I wrote quickly, expecting attention from my usual handful of readers (you know who you are; thanks for hanging around.) and not the much bigger audience that the post ended up attracting.7

It would take too long to engage in a defence of each of these claims8 so instead I’ll set out what I see as the contradictions and confusions that come out of labelling all four tribes that inhabit Open-Government-Dataland as a single movement, and distinguishing them from tribes who do not appear on this map: those share a similar interest (eg, Civil Liberties groups and journalists) but who do not focus on data. I see little coherence in the interests or priorities of the Open-Government-Dataland tribes; in particular the giants of the south-west cast a dark shadow over the other quadrants, and the other tribes may have to drive them out of Open-Government-Dataland or succumb to their hegemony.

4 Do Civil Liberties and Privatization Belong Together?

Encyclopedia Britannica says that a social movement is a “loosely organized but sustained campaign in support of a social goal” and that’s the definition I’ll stick with. So what’s the social goal of the Open Data Movement? There is a technological goal, spelled out a few years ago by some of its leading lights in terms of the formats, timeliness, completeness and licensing of the data,9 but what is its social goal? Pretty much any description I’ve seen gives two separate goals: improved government efficiency and transparency, corresponding to the west and east hemispheres of Open-Government-Dataland.

Being in favour of efficiency and transparency is a bit like being in favour of chocolate and cheese: both are good, but it’s not clear that they have very much to do with each other. But the problem is deeper than this: Open Data advocates argue not just for efficiency, but for a particular vision of “efficiency” captured by Tim O’Reilly’s phrases “Government as a Platform” and “Gov 2.0”.10 This vision places the interests of “the public” or “the people” on the same side as corporations and in conflict with those of the state. The thinking of Open Data advocates is open to the same kind of critique that Jodi Dean makes today about Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn: that an apparent populist leftism disguises (intentionally or otherwise) an economically neoliberal agenda.

“Lasn misrepresents the economic problem of neoliberal capitalism as a division between neoclassical economics and the “new ecological or bionomic or psychonomic discipline that is bubbling underneath the surface.” Now maybe I just don’t know what he’s talking about, but it looks to me like the sort of stuff that is usually wrapped up as complexity theory, with all its talk about emergence and swarms and self-organization and criticality (I talk about this in the first chapter of Blog Theory). It’s the same set of ideas part of New Economy thinking, which isn’t opposed to neoliberalism at all but was a primary carr[ier] of it, especially insofar as regulation is bad and free flow is good. Thomas Friedman, after all, is like the poster boy of horizontality–The World is Flat”

It does seem to me that the ideologically neoliberal aspects of “Gov 2.0” have not been absorbed by some of those in the civil liberties tribe. Tim O’Reilly, for example, is both ambitious in his small-government vision (“Government 2.0… is government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and reimagined as if for the first time”) and explicit in his commitment to market-based delivery of services. He approvingly quotes David G. Robinson’s Government Data and the Invisible Hand:11 “Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens”. When it comes to healthcare he writes “[government] should not [take part] by competing with the private sector to deliver health services, but by investing in infrastructure (and ‘rules of the road’) that will lead to a more robust private sector ecosystem”.

The “Government as Platform” vision is even more market-driven than that of the “Cambridge Study” reported by Jo Bates (link), and to which Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation contributed. As Bates says, the Cambridge Study argued for “unrefined digital data to be available for re-use at marginal cost (general zero for digital resources), whilst the charging regime on refined PSI products should remain intact. These refined products, it is argued, would then be in fair competition with other suppliers, since there would be equal access to unrefined data inputs… In a further paper, Pollock goes on to argue that the optimal charging model would be direct state subsidy or, in some cases, charges to update the database. These economic arguments thus draw on a liberal economic paradigm with strong emphasis on supply-side policies based on removing constraints on commercial production through liberalisation and marketisation, combined with taxpayer subsidisation of infrastructural resources such as data.”

Jo Bates’s paper This is what modern deregulation looks like (link) explores the contradictions between the efficiency and transparency hemispheres in a thorough and lucid way and really you should just read that if you want a better-informed version of my own views. Here is one of the more abstract and general sections, that sums up her claims:

“the current ‘transparency agenda’ [of the UK government, supported by prominent Open Data advocates] should be recognised as an initiative that also aims to enable the marketisation of public services, and this is something that is not readily apparent to the general observer. Further, whilst democratic ends are claimed in the desire to enable “the public” to hold “the state” to account via these measures, there is an issue in utilising a dichotomy between the state and a notion of ‘the public’ which does not differentiate between citizens and commercial interests… The construction… encourages those attracted to civic engagement into an embrace of solidarity with profit seeking interests, distanced from the ever suspect notion of the state.”

The “Government as Platform” vision widely accepted among Open Data advocates12 thus overlaps significantly with the views of the UK government quoted by Jo Bates, culminating in Francis Maude’s statement that Open Government Data is “what modern deregulation looks like”. Is this neoliberal deregulation a vision that Tom Lee and David Eaves support?

The transparency agenda has been used by the PSI Reuse industry and by right-wing governments as a camouflage for other, economically neoliberal goals. Tom Lee describes the Open Data Movement as a “self-described nonpartisan activist movement” but while I accept his argument that the Civil Liberties tribe, including the Sunlight Foundation, are non-partisan (and, yes, are a movement), I do not think his characterisation can carry over to other tribes. The support, tacit or otherwise, of the Civil Liberties groups for the “Government as Platform” agenda, means that the Sunlight Foundation is promoting a neoliberal economic position with which its members may not agree.13 I don’t dismiss the views of Kevin Merrit, CEO of Socrata, as “self-serving and profit-motivated” when he argues that the Open Data Movement has promoted transparency, but I do believe there is a conflict of interest (which is a structural fact, not a personal quality) between arguing for an Open Data policy and then making money by providing software to implement that policy. It’s a conflict that makes episodes such as New York City’s unfortunate release of individual teacher assessments more likely.

5 Civic and Commercial Interests: Complement or Conflict?

Most Open Data advocates don’t phrase the issue in terms of private-sector provision of services, but instead phrase it in terms of civic engagement, non-profit groups, and “people”. Tim O’Reilly often phrases his arguments purely in terms of a civic public (and may see it that way himself), as in “This is the right way to frame the question of Government 2.0. How does government become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate?”

Carl Malamud goes further, arguing that the Open Data Movement is a replacement for a regime in which “the commercial sector is raping and pillaging the public treasury, getting exclusive deals on data that not only keeps out other companies, but researchers, public interest groups, and everybody else who make up ‘the public.’ In many cases, the government data is so tightly behind a cash register that even government workers enforcing the law can’t afford to buy copies of the data they produce or the rules they promulgated.” Others see no conflict between commerce and civic activity in this area: Tom Lee writes “I think it’s flatly wrong to consider private actors’ interest in public data to be uniformly problematic.”

David Eaves makes a strong argument for the vitality of the civic hacker tribe, and points out that Open Data has been largely ignored by Canadian corporations (although US companies such as Socrata have gained contracts for providing municipal “open data platforms”). The Canadian environment may be like that of the UK, where there is a “heavy weighting towards micro/small businesses in the … IT sector” to quote Jo Bates. Similarly, there are just are not that many Canadian companies deeply involved in government operations or in the use of public data.

(There have been positive statements from Open Text, and Desire2Learn has sponsored an “Edge Challenge” that has attracted app developers using open transit data [disclaimer: in my day job I have had some tangential involvement in that competition], but I can see what he means.)

So why would I focus on the private-sector, market-based actors of the south west quadrant when the civic hackers are perhaps more prevalent? Because of an argument made a year or two ago by Michael Gurstein, who asks “who is in a position to make ‘effective use’ of this newly available data?” and answers himself:

“‘open data’ empowers those with access to the basic infrastructure and the background knowledge and skills to make use of the data for specific ends. Given in fact, that these above mentioned resources are more likely to be found among those who already overall have access to and the resources for making effective use of digitally available information one could suggest that a primary impact of “open data” may be to further empower and enrich the already empowered and the well provided for rather than those most in need of the benefits of such new developments.”

Data’s value is combinatorial. It is most powerfully used by those who can combine it with other sources of data and who have the scale and resources to use it effectively. I think it’s fine that “civic hackers” are developing transit apps, but in the end that market is likely to be won by a single company under the current licensing and standards approaches.14

While Open Data advocates appear “open” to many new ideas, everything I’ve read suggests that they are near-united on the principle of “non-discriminatory” licensing, meaning making data available to commercial enterprises (of any size) on the same terms as to the Civic Hackers. The economy of data-driven products is similar to the economics of cultural industries: it tends to end in winner-take-all outcomes and favours large-scale enterprises. In cultural markets, this tendency has led many countries to adopt a toolbox of techniques to maintain domestic cultural industries in the face of the scale of the American cultural industry, from quotas to subsidies to non-market providers.15 Such measures have much in their favour, yet the Open Data Movement is apparently united in opposing them.

Economically, Silicon Valley is likely to be the major winner in the Open Government Data game. It is difficult to see how to justify a subsidy to Silicon Valley companies as a priority for cash-strapped governments of smaller countries.

An example: Jo Bates (again) describes the interest in weather data. “In the context of the UK there has been significant lobbying by the financial industry to get better access to UK weather data so that it is able to compete in this [weather risk management] market. Groups such as the Lighthill Risk Network, of which Lloyds of London are a member, have lobbied government for better weather data so that they can develop risk based weather products. Similarly, the insurance industry has requested real time information on the pretext that they might respond more quickly to extreme weather events such as flooding. My own research and the recent announcement suggest that these demands have been met enthusiastically by well placed policy makers in national government who are keen to develop a UK weather derivatives market.” Weather risk management might seem like an odd duck, but Bates reports that “This weather risk management market far outweighs the USA’s commercial weather products market which in 2000 was estimated at approximately $500 million a year”, touching over $45 billion in 2005-06.

The rhetoric of civic engagement is appealing, but blurring the boundary between small-scale civic “hackathons” and the major financial institutions is a position that simply ignores major economic and political issues.

The benefits of standards-driven formats are, for municipal activities, not obvious unless you want to attract global interest. I continue to believe that licensing and formats are an area where there is still room for innovation, and where a premature focus on standardization may shorten the lifespan of civic-hacker use of municipal data before the big players get to pull it into their own systems. I’d argue, as I have before, for some form of charging to be enabled, at least on large-scale commercial use of data. I’d also argue that standardization should not be high on the agenda for municipal governments looking to build and collaborate with a local community of hackers.

6 Summary

Let me return to my three claims:

  1. It’s not a movement in a political or cultural sense of the word.
  2. It’s doing nothing for transparency and accountability in government.
  3. It’s co-opting the language of progressive change in pursuit of a small-government-focused subsidy for industry.

I’d argue that (1) holds: there is simply too much incoherence, too much in the way of conflicting interests and non-overlapping goals, for the “Open Data Movement” to be a movement. And see also the footnote.14

Item (2) is harsh. There are many within the “Open Data” sphere who live in the Civil Liberties area who have made significant contributions to transparency and accountability. But as a net effect, I’d stand by the claim – the overall impact of open data initiatives could well be to promote a kind of government that is prone to secrecy, as “small government” parties have often been.

Item (3): the co-option is being done by a vocal and influential section of Open Data advocates, but I’d definitely hold to the claim that the language of progressive change is being used, and the actions of civil liberties activists used, by some whose agenda is closer to neoliberal than egalitarian.

If you are still with me after all that; thanks for reading.

Footnotes:

1 Harlan Yu and David G. Robinson, /The New Ambiguity of “Open Government”/, Working Paper, draft of Feb 28, 2012. Retrieved from SSRN.

2 Jo Bates, /”This is what modern deregulation looks like”: co-optation and contestation in the shaping of the UK’s Open Government Initiative/, The Journal of Community Informatics, 8 (2). Retrieved from ci-journal.net.

3 This article adopts a northern-hemispherical hegemonic worldview.

4 David Eaves, Open Data Movement is a Joke?, May 2, 2012. Retrieved from eaves.ca.

5 Tom Lee, Defending the Big Tent: Open Data, Inclusivity and Activism, May 2, 2012. Retrieved from sunlightfoundation.com

6 Alex Howard, No joke: Open data fuels transparency, civic utility and economic activity, May 2, 2012. Retrieved from govfresh.com.

7 If I had know the audience was to be so large, I would have written more cautiously, and then the audience would not have been so large.

8 While I don’t want to trespass on everyone’s attention for that length of time, if you are interested in discussing these do send me an email (tslee at web dot ca) and I’d be happy to respond.

9 Open Government Working Group, 8 Principles of Open Government Data, 8 December 2007. Retrieved from opengovdata.org.

10 Tim O’Reilly, Government as Platform, Chapter 1 of /Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice/, Retrieved from oreilly.com.

11 David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William P. Zeller, and Edward W. Felten, Government Data and the Invisible Hand, 11 Yale J.L. & Tech. 160 (2009). Retrieved from SSRN.

12 The only dissenting view I’ve seen that tackles it explicitly, apart from my own, is that of Andrea DiMaio, who also has some smart things to say here.

13 On this I disagree with Catherine Fitzpatrick, who shares some of my views about the Open Data movement and argues forcefully for them here. I appreciate Catherine’s robust arguments in the debate, but she does come at this from a very different political point of view to my own, as her comment on Tom Lee’s post makes clear.

14 Aside: David Eaves’ description of municipal-level civic-hackers (North-West quadrant) in Canada is compelling, but this group of people is also Not a Movement. Now some people claim not to care about the word “movement”, and if you don’t then skip back to the main text, but I think it matters.

There are many admirable socially and civically beneficial activities that are not movements. Many people coach children’s sports teams (I’ve done it myself); millions of people take part in such activities, they are committed, involved, and do a lot of civic good, but they do not form a movement: I was a soccer coach, not a public sports activist. Similarly, birdwatching has a long and distinguished history of contributing to social goals (protection of birds and their habitats) and of sharing their observations in socially and scientifically useful ways (my brother Dorset Dipper contributes to the Hertfordshire Bird Atlas) but birdwatching is a hobby, not a movement. This thing about technologists claiming to be a movement is something that, perhaps irrationally, irritates me. Calling “Open Data” a movement is not quite as daft as calling “NoSQL” a movement, despite the arguments of O’Reilly’s Mike Loukides, but to my mind invoking a “movement” is a way to give added weight and significance to activities that may be admirable and useful, but that are ultimately uncontentious: it smacks of self-importance and that rubs me the wrong way.

15 For a fine description of the economics of cultural products, and the toolboxes that smaller economies have used to maintain cultural diversity, see Blockbusters and Trade Wars by Peter S. Grand and Chris Wood, Douglas & McIntyre 2005. Link.

Date: 2012-05-08 21:40:38

Org version 7.8.06 with Emacs version 23

Is philosophy a joke?

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No, not a continuation of the theme of the previous two posts.

My son, who has been pursuing a degree in philosophy over the last couple of years with steadily mounting frustration, has decided to "drop out", work for a while, and consider where he goes next. He signs off his blog here:

Although it is unfortunate to quit before I can figure out whether (the vast majority of) philosophers are actually as staggeringly incompetent as they appear to be, or are simply playing an elaborate practical joke, I simply couldn’t stand it either way.

Yes, he's disenchanted. I'm proud of him and his efforts to find a way to apply reason to important questions about life, and I've been dismayed to watch the discipline of philosophy lose someone as motivated as he has been, punishing originality rather than encouraging it, pandering to intuition, and giving up on reason while spending its time on issues such as whether proper names are rigid designators.

I'm no philosopher, but while I look forward to seeing what my son does next, I have no inclination whatsoever to read Naming and Necessity.

Reactions to ‘Why the “Open Data Movement” is a Joke’

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[Update: In the light of morning I dislike this post. I'll leave it up, but it is too defensive, explains too much, and is too conciliatory given what was thrown at me yesterday.]

This morning's post, Why the "Open Data Movement" is a Joke, attracted more attention than most of what I've written here. Largely this was a result of a Twitter debate between Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) and O'Reilly Media's Alex Howard (@digiphile). Thanks also to Lorenz Matzat (@lorz) and Ryan Shaw (@rybesh) for arguing broadly in favour of the post.

Alex Howard hated the piece, calling it "ill-informed", "lazy, ignorant writing" that "didn't even bother to cite the relevant scholarship", "demonstrably incorrect", "laughable" and more. He also writes that "The author has a habit of writing polemics that include errors or omissions of fact." I am terrible at expressing anything in 140 chars so I'll respond here.

First, it should be obvious that the post was prompted by events here in Canada – and yet no one has actually mentioned any of the Canadian content in any of the comments about the post. This is frustrating. The last five years have been terrible ones for accountability and transparency in this country and yet Canada has just joined and endorsed the Open Government Partnership (link). Does this conjunction say anything about "open data" as a goal? To me it says that a technological "open data" agenda does not indicate a political "open data" agenda, and that — as I wrote about the Wikileaks cables a year ago (link) –the fault lines of political beliefs run perpendicular to attitudes about technology, not parallel. So it made me wonder if the idea of open data as a goal for a coherent movement holds water, and whether "opening government via technology" make sense. To Alex Howard – well I don't really know, because for all his outrage he doesn't actually say anything about the first half of the post or about the events that obviously moved me to write it and led to the frustrated tone I wrote it in.

Beyond that, he seems to confuse my contention that the idea of open data as a "movement" is a joke with a broader claim that "open data" is a waste of time or that people working on making data open are all dupes. No such thing! Open data can be a fine thing, but I'd much rather have a fully-staffed StatsCan charging for data than a half-staffed StatsCan providing it for free. Which would he choose? Obviously a fully-staffed StatsCan providing data for free would be ideal, but it doesn't look like we're getting that any time soon. The UK's Francis Maude, the incoming co-chair of the Open Government Partnership, says that "we want to create an army of armchair auditors who can hold government to account". This would be nice, but not at the cost of a real independent auditor.

I suspect that Alex Howard and I just see the world from different points of view. Que sera, sera. But from what I know the Sunlight Foundation is on the side of the angels so I was disappointed to see that Tom Lee of the Sunlight Foundation considered my post "a jumbled mess". I do realize that coalition politics makes strange bedfellows, and that broad coalitions can still be worthwhile, but some tents can be so big that they collapse in a shapeless pile of canvas. I worry that the open data tent is one such, and that the apparent common goals of some people under the canvas hide bigger differences.  I share the concerns of Alex Howard's colleague Nat Torkington when he writes this:

Obama and his staff, coming from the investment mindset, are building a Gov 2.0 infrastructure that creates a space for economic opportunity, informed citizens, and wider involvement in decision making so the government better reflects the community's will. Cameron and his staff, coming from a cost mindset, are building a Gov 2.0 infrastructure that suggests it will be more about turning government-provided services over to the private sector.

For me, the gap between the two visions is fundamental and makes the idea that these two goals are part of the same movement, well, a joke. The tension/contradiction between commercial and civic interests that these sentences highlight is one division that seems unresolved and yet fundamental. So having read the responses, I stand by what I wrote.

Why the “Open Data Movement” is a Joke

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 Two recent announcements from Canada prompt my mood this morning:

A government can simultaneously be the most secretive, controlling Canadian government in recent memory and be welcomed into the club of "open government". The announcements highlight a few problems with the "open data movement" (Wikipedia page):

  • It's not a movement, at least in any reasonable political or cultural sense of the word,
  • It's doing nothing for transparency and accountability in government,
  • It's co-opting the language of progressive change in pursuit of what turns out to be a small-government-focused subsidy for industry.

    • In short, the open data movement is a joke. Those who are on the political left who lend their support to it have some hard decisions to make.

    The Canadian Case: Open is an empty word

    The Harper government's actions around "open government", and the lack of any significant consequences for those actions, show just how empty the word "open" has become. For readers outside the country, here is a selection:

    • Cancelling the compulsory long-form census (link), thereby demolishing a source of reliable statistical data that guides government decisions and debates over national priorities. "The information previously collected by the long-form census questionnaire will be collected as part of the new voluntary National Household Survey (NHS)." The decision prompted Statscan head Munir Sheikh to resign (link).
    • Firing Health Canada scientists who speak publicly on drug safety issues (link). [Update: as "d" comments below, this was the Liberal government in 2004]
    • Muzzling Canada's public scientists in other departments, with one example being Fisheries and Oceans scientist Kristi Miller (link). More broadly, "Natural Resources Canada scientists have had to get pre-approval from Minister Christian Paradis's office to speak with journalists. They must also get ministerial approval for everything they say to the news media." (link).

    It's got to the stage where the Canadian Association of Journalists recently awarded its "Code of Silence" award for Canada's most secretive government or publicly-funded agency to the entire federal government (link).

    While there has been opposition to these moves, I think it's fair to say that the "open data movement" has not been central to it. But never mind, Statistics Canada data is now available for free on the government's web site (link). There seems to be no link between the government's actions and the actions of this "movement", and basically that's because the Open Data Movement is more focused on formats, digitally-acessible data sets, free access to postal codes, and so on than it is focused on actual government transparency around issues that matter. It's a movement that has had no impact on government accountability.

    Who is the Open Data Movement?

    Am I being unfair? Who, after all, is the Open Data Movement? Well it turns out there isn't one really, at least when it comes to "open data" in the sense of "open government data", which along with "open scientific data" is one of the two most common uses of the term.

    "Open Data Movement" is a phrase dragged out by media-oriented personalities to cloak a private-sector initiative in the mantle of progressive politics. Along with other cyberculture terms ("hacktivism", "unconferences", "hackathons") the word "movement" suggests a countercultural grass-roots initiative for social change, but there isn't anything of the sort that I can see.

    Take Tim O'Reilly, who has thrown the phrase around for some time (see here for an example from a couple of years ago). Like others who use the phrase, he sees no conflict between civic culture and corporate interests, so the Strata conferences and Open Government conferences he has run have been sponsored by major software, hardware, and computer services companies (including, I think, my employer, for whom I do not speak). Strata 2012, for example, is co-hosted by Cloudera, sponsored by EMC and MapR, and many others.

    Or take the "Code for America" initiative, which uses language that is explicitly about promoting an alternative vision of how government works ("it's about citizenship and how the internet is fundamentally reshaping the way government can work", It's "a Peace Corp for geeks") and which has many well-intentioned people involved. Yet when it comes to it, there's a lot more here about making uncontroversial data available (including for commercial use) than there is about anything like challenging government on actual accountability or transparency. So it's no surprise that the list of donors includes major corporations like EMC (again), ESRI, Google, O'Reilly Media, and Microsoft.

    It's not that there's necessarily anything wrong with Code for America, more that it's not a movement in any political or even cultural sense. Another member of the CfA donor list is the Omidyar Network, set up by the eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, and it reflects his view that private sector corporate profit-making activity and civic activity are not in tension, but complement each other.

    As a result, the actual activities of this "movement" end up being to push for government subsidies of private-sector activity. It's "big society" all over again. This is the TED worldview, so it's no surprise that the recent Open Government Partnership wraps itself in noble goals such as fighting "corruption, closed doors, the consolidation of power" (see Hillary Rodham Clinton's remarks) and basks in the reflected virtue of TED fellow Walid Al-Saqaf (Open data vital for a new Yemen) when the most likely outcomes are privatisation initiatives of the kind promoted by Francis Maude.

    Abandoning "Free for Commercial Use"

    Progressives involved in open data work, of which there are many, could do something useful here. In order to prevent actions around government transparency being hijacked as a front for corporations to get at subsidised raw material, they could promote a "non-commercial use" license of the kind that is an option under some variants of Creative Commons content license.

    Until now, groups and individuals with some credibility on the left have maintained constructive if arms-length relations with the corporate/civic almagam that is the Open Data Movement. It's time for them to draw a line, and not let their own often-admirable initiatives get used as a smokescreen for privatisation and small-government initiatives.

    Are any doing so, or are there explicitly-progressive initiatives that are making a difference? I'd be interested to hear.

    More reading

    Basically, this post follows on from this and this, which I wrote a couple of years ago.