(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 … Continue reading

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.

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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.

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Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Open Government Data Landscape
• 3 Open Data: Is it a Movement?
• 4 Do Civil Liberties and Privatization Belong Together?
• 5 Civic and Commercial Interests: Complement or Conflict?
• 6 Summary

1 Introduction

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

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).

The longitude, marked across the x axis, indicates the impact of the data itself. The line … Continue reading

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.

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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 … Continue reading

 Two recent announcements from Canada prompt my mood this morning:

• Canada Joins International Open Government Partnership
• Conservative Cuts put half of Statscan jobs at risk

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):

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 … Continue reading