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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:
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.
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).
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”:
It’s not a movement in a 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 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:
It’s not a movement in a 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 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
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