Open Data Seminar

For those who wanted a more print-friendly version of the open data seminar that we’ve been running, here’s a “PDF”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/open_data-latex1.pdf (bog-standard memoir class document I’m afraid – I don’t have John H.’s design skills). It’s available under a Creative Commons non-commercial license – those who want to do their own remixes may want the underlying LaTeX file, which is available “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/open_data-latex.txt. Below, links to the various posts, in order of publication:

“Tom Slee”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/25/seeing-like-a-geek/ draws connections between James Scott and the awkward relationship between open data and actual empowerment.

“Victoria Stodden”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/26/reasoning-with-open-data/ suggests that people interested in the political aspects of open data should learn from the efforts of computational scientists to preserve the step-by-step process through which final results were produced.

“Steven Berlin Johnson”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/27/searching-for-john-snows/ argues that open data platforms can attract, empower and even create people interested in solving complex problems.

“Matthew Yglesias”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/28/open-data-journalism/ makes the case that open data is crucial to journalism, and that there is often a case for government to produce it.

“Clay Shirky”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/02/cooperation-and-corruption/ argues that there are two different strands of open data advocacy, one devoted to improving services, the other to actually tackling corruption, and that the former works rather better than the latter.

“Aaron Swartz”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/03/a-database-of-folly/ finds that open data and transparency don’t address _either_ structural problems of corruption, or help make life more efficient.

“Henry Farrell”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/04/trish-reiner-and-the-politics-of-open-data/ argues that open data will not change politics, but would have advantages under a different political configuration than the one we have.

“Beth Noveck”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/05/open-data-the-democratic-imperative/ sees open data as a foundation for complex democracy and a wellspring of innovation in government.

“Tom Lee”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/06/open-data-better-politics-winning-politics-but-still-politics/ worries that open data advocates tend towards a blithe over-optimism, but maintains that it still has democratic benefits.

My alma mater had a celebrity professor of political science who was principally known for two things. First, for accidentally leaving his wireless mic on during mid-lecture restroom breaks. And second, for the slogan “Politics is a good thing!” which he relentlessly promoted via mediums as diverse as lectures, TV appearances and TA’s t-shirts.

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Open Data are the basis for government innovation. This isn’t because open data make government more transparent or accountable. Like Tom Slee, I have serious doubts about whether it does either of those things. In any event, shining a light on the misdeeds of ineffective institutions isn’t as imperative as redesigning how they work.  Instead, open data can provide the raw material to convene informed conversations inside and outside institutions about what’s broken and the empirical foundation for developing solutions together.

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Ongoing debates over open data remind me of Cory Doctorow’s short story, “Human Readable”:http://craphound.com/?p=3275, which depicts attitudes to technology through a disagreement between lovers. Reiner is a classic hacker – he thinks of the world in terms of technological fixes for technological problems, and has difficulty in believing that the algorithms can be systematically skewed. Trish is a classic lefty, who thinks of the world in terms of power relations, and, specifically, in terms of how smart powerful people figure out ways to gimmick the system so that it works to their advantage. They don’t understand each other very well but end up, sort of, figuring out a way to cooperate. Clearly, real life people have more complicated views than Doctorow’s characters – even so, he’s put his finger on an important tension. When I went to Foo Camp a few years ago, I found it incredibly intellectually exhilarating – meeting a bunch of people who were both (a) smarter than me, and (b) intensely practical, interested in figuring out how to do stuff rather than study it. But I was also a bit nonplussed by how enthusiastically many of them believed that the Obama administration was going to usher in a new era of Big Data led technocracy. A lot of them (not all of them) didn’t seem to have any very good idea of how politics actually worked. They were mostly Reiner, without much admixture of Trish.
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The open data movement is a hammer which has gathered the support of many nails. There are the curious taxpayers, who feel their annual checks mean they deserve a peek at the interesting facts the government has collected. There are the ambitious business owners, who see an opportunity to privatize profits from work with socialized costs. And there are the self-styled activists, who believe that if we reveal the data on what the government is really doing, we will arrest corruption by exposing it to sunlight.

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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.)

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In the practical community of professional journalists writing about political events, the term “open data” is hardly ever in circulation. And yet, to those who are doing the best work it’s an invaluable tool. David Simon succeeded in turning the idea that information age journalists need to learn to “do more with less” into a national joke, but the underlying concept makes perfect sense. The very same information technology revolution that’s undermined the business models of traditional newspapers has done an enormous amount to increase the productivity of working journalists. Open data is an enormous part of that.

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Sometime in the early 1840s, a British doctor and statistician named William Farr took control of the Weekly Returns Of Births And Deaths, a publication of the Registrar General’s office where Farr worked. Variants of the Weekly Returns had been published by the state for at least two centuries before Farr took over, but for most of that time the Returns recorded only the name of the newly born or newly dead, and the parish where they resided. But Farr was what we would now call an Open Data advocate, and over time he greatly expanded the information disseminated through the Weekly Returns. By the mid 1850s, the Returns tracked age, cause of death, occupation–even the elevation of the dead’s primary residence. (Farr believed that people living in higher altitudes had healthier lives.) Inspired by a debate with one of his contemporaries, the Soho doctor John Snow, Farr even added information on the deceased’s regular source of drinking water.

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It’s hard to argue with increased government transparency and accountability. Who wouldn’t welcome a bulwark against opportunist backroom deals and increased incentives for rulemakers to think carefully about policy decisions? However, the link between these goals and open data isn’t obvious and depends on what is being made available, and how it is being made available. I argue that what’s actually useful is the reasoning process that underlies decision making, of which the data are just one part.

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Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen many men, I guess;
Some will rob you with a six gun,
And some with a GIS. 

In the state of Tamil Nadu, near the town of Marakkanam, right next to a reserved forest, lies a contested plot of land. Records say these three acres belong to a member of the Mudaliar caste, but lower-caste Dalits living nearby claim the plot should be part of the reserved forest, which is not privately owned. The Dalits claim that the Mudaliars have pulled a fast one, using their influence in the local bureaucracy to fix the land records, and that older records will bear out the Dalit claim. Complicating the case, officials say that boundaries between land parcels in the area are often difficult to ascertain.¹

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Another Crooked Timber seminar, albeit on an issue rather than an author. Last month, Tom Slee wrote “two”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/why-the-open-data-movement-is-a-joke.html “posts”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/open-data-movement-redux-tribes-and-contradictions.html on the Open Data movement which got a lot of interesting argument going. To push the contradictions further, we’ve invited a number of people with differing perspectives to write short pieces on the theme of when and how, if ever, open data makes for better politics. Contributors are:

Henry Farrell (blogger at Crooked Timber)
Steven Berlin Johnson (author of _Emergence_, _Where Good Ideas Come From_, and the forthcoming _Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age_)
Tom Lee (director of Sunlight Labs at the “Sunlight Foundation”:http://sunlightfoundation.com/)
Beth Noveck (professor at New York Law School, author of _Wiki Politics_, and former Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House)
Clay Shirky (author of _Here Comes Everybody and _Cognitive Surplus_)
Tom Slee (author of _No-One Makes You Shop at Walmart_)
Victoria Stodden (assistant professor of statistics at Columbia, Big Data public intellectual)
Aaron Swartz (in no need of introduction to CT readers
Matthew Yglesias (author of Slate‘s Moneybox column).

As per the last seminar, posts will be put up (nearly) every weekday for the next several days. And yes – as commenters will surely notice, the sex ratio is off again (all I can say is that this is not the result of any lack of effort, I’m not happy about it, and I’d be grateful for suggestions in comments).