Open Data Movement Redux: Tribes and Contradictions

“1. Introduction...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... here is a map of Open-Government-Dataland... 3. Open Data: Is it a Movement? ... the three claims I made last week about the "Open Data Movement": [a] It's not a movement in a political or cultural sense of the word. [b] It's doing nothing for transparency and accountability in government. [c] It's co-opting the language of progressive change in pursuit of a small-government-focused subsidy for industry.... 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 atechnological 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... 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... 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... 5. Civic and Commercial Interests: Complement or Conflict? ... 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...’ 6. Summary...”