Cooperation and Corruption

tl;dr The Open Data movement is good at improving service, but bad at
rooting out corruption

Tom Slee has done us a favor by “kicking”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/why-the-open-data-movement-is-a-joke.html “off”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/open-data-movement-redux-tribes-and-contradictions.html a conversation about the values, goals, and coherence of the Open Data movement. I share his sense that the movement has been a disappointment to date. However, as my principles differ from his, my sense of disappointment, and of what to do about it, differ as well.

Before I get to that, I want to position myself relative to Slee’s three summary assertions about the Open Data movement. (The points are Slee’s; the reactions mine.)

1. It’s not a movement in a political or cultural sense of the word.

I think Slee has this one wrong. In particular, two of his rationales — the Open Data movement has no political goals, and what goals it does have are too variable to cohere — seem to me to be willful attempts to deny use of a word he likes to a movement he doesn’t. Slee commits a sin he accuses the Open Data people of, namely over-focusing on technology and under-focusing on the political aspects of the work. The people improving bus schedules and the people uncovering graft may differ in their aims, but they share core values: they want to reconfigure the relationship between government and citizens concerning what the government knows and citizens don’t. This is an inherently political goal.

2. It’s doing nothing for transparency and accountability in government.

This is trivially wrong — it is plainly doing _something_, as Slee later notes — but his formulation in the body of the essay is more interesting: the net effect of transparency and accountability could end up being negative. I’ll agree with this assertion (though for somewhat different reasons than Slee), and spend the bulk of the essay on it. (I’ll also concentrate on the US case; I admire the work of Canadian participants in the Open Data movement, especially “David Eaves”:http://eaves.ca, but I don’t know enough about the Harper Government to make my comments useful.)

3. It’s co-opting the language of progressive change in pursuit of a small-government-focused subsidy for industry.

This is partly true, in that the Open Data movement does not strongly distinguish between for-profit and non-profit use. Slee’s use of ‘co-opting’ reflects his disapproval of commercial re-use; people who approve of the private sector creating new services with government data would use different language. Slee clearly regards the Commercial Service Delivery quadrant of his map as Mordor; this is where I disagree with him most strongly.

I’ve gotten extraordinary value out of commercial services like Google Maps and Weather Underground, value I don’t think the government could deliver as well. Furthermore, open access to this data limits pre-open-data monopolies of the sort enjoyed by AccuWeather or Westlaw, an improvement pursued most aggressively by Carl Malamud, our Living National Treasure of open data since before the movement had a name. I’ll adopt “the observation made by Tom Lee”:http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/05/02/defending-the-big-tent-open-data-inclusivity-and-activism/ (not Slee) as my own: “I think it’s flatly wrong to consider private actors’ interest in public data to be uniformly problematic.”

With that out of the way, I’ll say that for me, the Open Data movement has been a net disappointment. In the middle of the last decade, I attended a meeting of the then-nascent movement. We gathered in a loft filled with techies and journalists and good government people, all looking for common ground. It was like a tent revival, so infections was the excitement. The job at hand, or so it then seemed, was to fit every government database with an API (that magical acronym!), whereupon bus schedules would appear on our phones and corrupt politicians would be driven from office.

We got the APIs. We got the bus schedules. The politicians, however, have yet to lose much sleep over open data.

There are several possible explanations for this. Here are some I am explicitly rejecting: I don’t believe corruption in the US is rare. I don’t believe it’s expertly hidden; “Bethany Mclean”:”http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/13/news/companies/enronoriginal_fortune/index.htm helped doom Enron by reading their financial statements carefully. I don’t believe action is impossible; when ProPublica and the LA Times “exposed the incompetence of the California nursing board”:http://www.propublica.org/series/nurses, the Governor fired that entire board the next day.

Instead, I believe the broad failure of the Open Data movement to root out much corruption is tied to organizational failure, or rather failures. So, following Slee, I’ll offer three observations of my own.

1. The institutions that are good with data tend to be bad at story telling.

People don’t consume facts. They consume stories. People who understand the importance of data are generally the people most enthusiastic about interpreting it; as a result, we systematically overestimate how general citizen interest in data actually is. (The best expression of this gap remains Tom Steinberg’s “Asking the wrong question about Data.gov”:http://steiny.typepad.com/premise/2011/04/asking-the-wrong-question-about-datagov.html.

People choose proxies for understanding complex issues, not because they are lazy, but because “we can’t not”:http://www.amazon.com/How-You-Know-Economics-Knowledge/dp/0691137552. They look, for example, for assertions that global climate change is or is not real, rather than searching out charts of temperature charts or maps of sea level. For civil liberties activists and data journalists to have even a fraction of the effect they intend, they will have to set aside the fantasy that telling the truth is enough. They will have to get good at telling true stories, or get good at partnering with organizations that are good at telling those stories.

Which brings me to the second failure.

2. Institutions that are good at story telling tend to be bad with data.

News organizations are paid to tell true stories. Unfortunately, much of this story telling is uninformed by the kind of numeracy that would be required to take advantage of even the simplest open data.

One tiny but illustrative example — newspaper articles often feature statements about income distribution like these:

bq. “Sunnyvale”:http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_20736434/sunnyvale-top-ten-american-city-raising-kids “boasts an average family income of 123,647.”

bq. “Two companies opening warehouses”:http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=386674 “are expected to employ 1,000 workers, with an average employee’s annual salary of 37,000.”

You would not guess, reading these articles, that a sizable majority of families in Sunnyvale make less than 123,000 a year, or that the salaries of most workers in the new Bethel, PA warehouses will be less than 37,000.

Journalists routinely underreport degrees of financial inequality, because they routinely treat averages as if they represented something the normal participant in the system would see. (It’s like that old joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar and everyone inside becomes a millionaire, on average.) Newspaper style guides, to their credit, clearly define what averages are supposed to mean; editors, to their detriment (and ours) simply do not enforce the correct use of even this basic mathematical concept.

The Open Data movement often puts forward visions of sophisticated, interactive uses of data that provides citizens with valuable insights. This does sometimes happen, as with Dollars for Docs or the visualization of gay rights state by state. But these are rare cases; as appealing as it is to imagine a press corps that exposes new truths by interpreting new data, the normal case is that they do not even correctly express existing truths with existing data.

3. Transparency is often mere translucency.

If all that were going on was a cultural misfit between people who understand data and people who understand narrative, we could improve things with a few kumbaya meetings. The third great obstacle, though, is that powerful actors do not want transparency. I agree with Slee’s “observation”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/why-the-open-data-movement-is-a-joke.html that “A government can simultaneously be the most secretive…in recent memory and be welcomed into the club of “open government”. Slee talks about the decision by the Canadian government to “abandon StatsCan”:http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2010/07/21/statistics-canada-quits.html, a decision similar to Republican attempts to “reduce the effectiveness of our census”:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/sunday-review/the-debate-over-the-american-community-survey.html. The problem is far broader, however.

As Wendy Wagner put it in her 2010 paper “Administrative Law, Filter Failure, and Information Capture”:http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1463&context=dlj:

bq. [E]very successful reform movement has its unintended consequences. What few administrative architects anticipated from the new commitment to “sunlight” was that a dense cloud of detailed, technical, and voluminous information would move in to obscure the benefits of transparency.

When we focus on how much data is made available, we create a world where powerful actors can live up to their nominal commitment to openness, while in practice reducing the utility of that data, by making data hard to understand or use, making it inconsistent over time, or producing high volumes of low-quality data while holding back low volumes of high quality data. In extreme cases, as with StatScan, a government can decide not to know certain things, rather than be forced to share that knowledge with citizens.

Now if this were just a technical issue, where laws needed to be written with cleaner specifications, solving these problems might be easy. But the deep problem is this — service delivery involves shared effort between public and private actors, while transparency must be oppositional to be valuable.

The distinction between service and transparency is a distinction between partnership and opposition. For me, this tension, far more than the commercial v.s non-commercial split that so exercises Slee, is the largest problem embedded in the current form and biases of the movement. I’m afraid the success of service delivery, wonderful as it is, has convinced many governments that they can make citizens happy by sharing useful data useful, while preserving secrecy in the very areas where political discipline matters most. The House Appropriations Committee has recently “proposed cutting off bulk access”:http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/hill-may-freeze-thomas-digital-past/572706 to legislative data. If this proposal succeeds, then the Federal Government will both release more data in 2013 than in 2012 _and_ the actions of our elected representatives will become even harder to oversee.

The likeliest scenario for the service/transparency coalition is that “Lee’s distinction”:http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/05/02/defending-the-big-tent-open-data-inclusivity-and-activism/ between open-as-in-data.gov and open-as-in-FOIA remains unresolved, with the transparency movement being relegated to second-class citizenship in the Open Data movement. Another scenario is that the movements split — “Code for America”:http://codeforamerica.org/, “See, Click, Fix”:http://seeclickfix.com/, and all the other groups trying to make government data more useful will come to define themselves less around the access to data and more around patterns of use and re-use. This could be salutary for the transparency movement, as the necessarily oppositional character of their efforts would become clearer, though they would also become harder to pursue, in part because of that clarity.

The third possibility, though (and for me, the best argument for the Open Data movement as a movement) is that the two halves of the movement make common cause. This would entail the service people saying to politicians “In order to take more credit for making the public’s life better, you also need to be more transparent about your own behavior.” This probably won’t happen — it will be hard for service-oriented groups to apply this kind of pressure without having it backfire — but it would create a better bundle than we have today.

Long after the last pothole has been seen, clicked, and fixed, I think the legacy of the Open Data movement is going to be assessed on its ability to limit powerful actors. I’m afraid that that legacy will be minimal, in part because I’m afraid the transparency people have brought a knife to a gun fight. It’s possible for private actors to make common cause with elected politicians and career civil servants around snow removal, but useful transparency will always require harder tactics, tactics especially including ways of using open data to tell stories that enrage the public.