Open Government and Open Data Are Not The Same Thing - Tech Europe - WSJ

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-08-16

Summary:

"Outside of Pyongyang (and maybe even there), what government wouldn’t want to be thought of as open? The U.K. has certainly made much political capital in portraying itself that way. Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude is responsible for the U.K.’s Government Digital Service and is a co-chairman of the Open Government Partnership, an international body that aims 'to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.' But somewhere along the line the terms 'open government' and 'open data' have been conflated. While governments have thrown out gigabytes of data “to promote transparency,” few — Finland being among them — have done much truly to 'empower citizens,' and certainly not the U.K. While the award-winning GDS has been successful in digitizing the processes of government, Mr. Maude was clear about its aim: delivering services 'better, cheaper, quicker, in a way that is likely to be more equitable and more accurate,' he told The Wall Street Journal. 'We are not changing the nature of democracy.' When asked how the citizen, having been empowered to do the business of government in a better way, is empowered to change the business of government he replied tersely: 'Through elections.' Given the response to previous attempts at opening up democracy, maybe his distrust in participatory democracy isn’t unreasonable. On coming to power in 2010 the coalition government launched a website to ask the public to nominate what laws it wanted repealed. But there was no promise that its choices would be enacted. Perhaps as a consequence there was a campaign to demand the overturning of the second law of thermodynamics. The website has since closed. The problem, said Joonas Pekkanen, a democracy campaigner in Finland, is that there is no sense of empowerment. 'Why should the people take it seriously if the government doesn’t take it seriously? You need to change the constitution and give people enough power that they feel they have actual power.' Finland has done exactly that. Last year it passed the Finnish Citizen’s Initiative, which allows citizens to draft legislation that has to be debated by Parliament ..."

Link:

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2013/08/15/open-government-and-open-data-are-not-the-same-thing/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.psi oa.policies oa.comment oa.government oa.legislation oa.crowd oa.uk oa.lay oa.finland oa.data

Date tagged:

08/16/2013, 16:43

Date published:

08/16/2013, 12:43