Reasoning and open data — Crooked Timber

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-06-27

Summary:

“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. A very real ‘open data’ movement is occurring right now in the computational sciences largely independently of open government data... Not all computational scientists use the term “open data” to describe this movement, and rightly so... In order to make verifiable claims, scientists are finding they need to communicate more information to explain their work that can be included in the traditional published article, in particular the precise computational steps that were taken to generate the results. Efforts to do this are emerging at the grassroots level in myriad fields, from biostatistics to geophysics to applied math to medical imaging [1] [2]. Accessing the data is a key part of verifiability of scientific results, but it isn’t enough... now the reproducible research movement advocates the sharing the computer code as well as the data that generated the results in the published article. http://www.RunMyCode.org is a new effort to facilitate broad scientific understanding... An interesting question is whether any of the structure developed for scientific knowledge dissemination can be carried over to the political case and further aims of understanding how decisions came about i.e. transparency and accountability. There appears to be at least some superficial concordance between the scientific and governance goals: communicating in complete detail how outcomes were reached, and the deep importance of broad community buy-in. If we follow standards for scientific communication, provenance and justification become paramount. In the political context this might mean providing explanations for how new rules were arrived at, including the evidence used in reasoning. For this perhaps idealistic goal open data is clearly a crucial element. There is a nice link between the movement toward reproducible computational science and the Obama administration’s push for evidence based policy when that evidence is scientific in nature. For these types of government decisions, the reproducible scientific research movement can supply the data and reasoning behind the supporting scientific findings, such as those from climate science or public health, and fill in this part of the chain of reasoning. Evidence based policy evaluation by governments is another area where there seems to be a tighter link between the methods used in communicating scientific findings and the explanation behind government policy funding decisions – convincing skeptics of your evidence through transparency in the reasoning process [3]. Here, scientific practice could provide a useful framework to help guide principles of government communication [4]. Scientific publication is, in some sense, ‘linearizing a nonlinear process.’ Interest lies in understanding the steps necessary to replicate the results, not in following all the steps that actually took place during the discovery process. How the political decision making process gets “linearized,” if it even does, is an open question. We’d like to know every influence on the outcome, but not the inconsequential ones. The fact that we don’t have enough government data to implement this vision today doesn’t bother me, as long as such data exist and they are making their way into the public sphere with a rapidity eclipsing that of Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, and a narrative can be constructed by decision makers that accurately captures how data were used in the political process. Data release seems to be steadily occurring, but a greater emphasis on communicating the reasoning made from the data could move the discussion toward transparency in government decision making.”

Link:

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/26/reasoning-with-open-data/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.policies oa.comment oa.open_science oa.government

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

06/27/2012, 20:55

Date published:

06/27/2012, 21:11