ResPublica's Deputy Director, Asheem Singh, on where left and right are getting it wrong on the 'Post-Bureaucratic Age'
So
data.gov.uk is the best. As in, 'best in the world.' 6 months after the Obama administration opened its trailblazing
data.gov site, Britain's site already has more than 3 times as much open, public data on a wide range of issues, available to all, online, as theirs offers today. Its creation was overseen by a national treasure, Tim Berners-Lee, the bona fide inventor of the internet. It is rife with traffic. It is an actual Government success. It is a symbol of present and future national glory.
It is a conceptual success for the Government too. In essence, data.gov.uk is the first step to what the Conservatives have repeatedly called the 'post-bureaucratic age,' an age where we are in charge of our own information and the channels of its distribution and coordination; where the tools of accountability are a finger click away. Where the opening and decentralisation of information is not just a metaphor for democracy, but the pith and substance of democracy itself. And the Government has made it happen.
A chance for the Government to steal a march on the Conservatives and a moment of national excellence to boot. So why has there been relatively little spoken or written about data.gov.uk?
Well, the first thing to remark upon is the implementation. I had a go at locating five random sets of data on the website. I located one XML file (good), one pdf file (bad – what can I do with a PDF File?) and 3 404 errors (very bad). Perhaps I was just unlucky; but the broader lesson is that while it is good to have the data out there, until it is in a form I can use – be it by plugging it in to Excel and making some graphs, or mashing it up with other visualisation tools such as Google maps - it may as well not be out there at all.
Secondly, on both left and right, the political narrative around opening up our data is malformed. Currently, it seems beyond the political brain to make a connection between releasing data online and empowering you and I in our everyday lives. The only one that comes close to having done a good job of it all is the very learned
Stephan Shakespeare, of YouGov and PoliticsHome, who has at least made a stab at turning the idea of openness and giving it a legislative body (I believe he advocates a 'Freedom of Data Act,' a sort of presumption of ownership over our own information). But, still, is this a narrative that means something to a critical mass of us?
Part of that problem, of course, is that political blogs are niche and fundamentally remote. Politico-philosophical blogs, perhaps, more so! And in that sense, the very real worry is that the 'open utopians' on both sides run the risk of creating the sort of discourse that will all but alienate the 'deniers' in a very similar way to the destructive, polarising debate around climate change. It is a poisoned chalice indeed, iin the sense that whichever side makes the running on this issue will inherit an entirely evangelical discourse from writers such as Chris Anderson and his California ideologues at Wired Magazine. With these prophets, the Post bureaucratic Age has every opportunity of becoming the right's version of the climate change debate.
For, whatever the utopians say, evangelical discourse on this matter obscures us to the real, serious political problems. After all, if information is to be made free, in order to make it useful, we have to rely on the beneficience of others (or developing our own capacity). For what do we do with our data – with those numbers, crosses and letters? We give it to people to make sense. And it is here that the arcane algorithms of the internet take us down some murky pathways. Are we really best placed to decide who should 'visualise' our information?
MySociety's Tom Steinberg may be a philosopher king, but Is Google Health our friend? Can Facebook be trusted to store our medical or psychiatric records as well as details of our favourite movies? Or will Blockbuster Video find themselves with reams of information passed on by those friendly folk at Facebook, poring over details of our anxieties in order to 'recommend' us a good chiller for the weekend.
How do we discern the proverbial good steward of our data? Is it the steward who can do most with it for least cost? Or is it the steward who expresses and initiates concern for our concerns; one who we know won't engage in the harvesting of data for the procurement in its customers of what Foucault called 'good practice': the systematic collection of data by a Government or business about its service users, so as to be able to offer them products they want at moments of weakness – but products that they may not need or may not even be in their own interests. Consider the civil liberties implications of the new 'terrorism-busting,' 'naked' airport scanners, and we arrive at something approaching an example of what I mean here.
And neither left or right has made the semblance of an effort to seriously engage with these issues. Part of the issue is that of 'accountability,' or more accurately, the ability to seek redress against a grievance when data released to these companies is often stored on a server in Palo Alto or Vanuatu. I wonder if there is a mutual solution here - as there is in public service reform generally. A need and a niche for a local, comprehensible community server space on the cloud – but lodged in a building owned by your community - administered by people with whom you interact, whom you cajole, whom you coax, in whose concern you have an ownership stake.
I think there is, and I will expand more on this idea in future posts. For now, suffice to say that the tragedy of the political resistance to the post bureaucratic narrative is that it is a genuinely important idea: a good story told badly. The possiblities for open data in terms of mining information, crowdsourcing efficiency searches, and more, are wide. There are further possibilities in the sense of enabling us to create social technology that provides services more mutually conveniently, for example having access to the working hours and locations of every careworker in a constituency might enable a parent to avoid having to petition the council for a live-in helper. Loosening regulation and lower information costs (remember
Coase's theorem) can only be good for the private sector, and for sustainable market entry for small businesses and to widespread social impact for voluntary organisations. Open data can also create a supply side shock in multi-purpose, open-source visualising tools.
The dangers are high and the possibilities are huge. And on this new centre ground lies an opportunity for both political sides. The mandate to govern comes from being able to paint, in spite of the horrible deficiencies in our economy and society, an honest and inventive picture of the positive, radical future of our nation. Whoever grabs this centre ground and makes it their own stands the best chance of painting that radically positive, optimistic picture. And if for no other reason, this is exactly why, now more than ever, winning political parties need to get with the programmers; and political communicators must enable our minds to be opened to the real possibilities – and be able to sketch solutions to the dangers - of a world where data is open.