Open House and Open Gov Data friends,
The guys over at Princeton's new Center for Information Technology
Policy wrote a really great paper for the Yale Journal of Law &
Technology on the role data should have, compared to websites, in
government. It articulates a point that I think many of us
subconsciously have had in mind:
"The new administration should specify that the federal government’s
primary objective as an online publisher is to provide data that is
easy for others to reuse, rather than to help citizens use the data in
one particular way or another."
And they suggest an interesting way to push that forward:
"The policy route to realizing this principle is to require that
federal government websites retrieve the underlying data using the
same infrastructure that they have made available to the public. Such
a rule incentivizes government bodies to keep this infrastructure in
good working order, and ensures that private parties will have no less
an opportunity to use public data than the government itself does. The
rule prevents the situation, sadly typical of government websites
today, in which governmental interest in presenting data in a
particular fashion distracts from, and thereby impedes, the provision
of data to users for their own purposes."
I think this is a worthwhile addition to the opengovdata and
publicmarkup.org policy documents --- if not as a direct recommendation
(because I think it may be too much to ask for in a grand form) then
noted as a long-term goal or (in terms of the second paragraph I quoted)
as a benchmark, a concrete way to tell whether data is open.
The full citation is: Robinson, David, Yu, Harlan, Zeller, William P and
Felten, Edward W, "Government Data and the Invisible Hand" (2008). Yale
Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 11, 2008
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1138083
I've gotten David, the first author (ehm, and long-time friend), to join
both of these lists, and he's interested in helping hash out good policy
recommendations with us.
--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)
Great comments, John. Government Information and The Invisible Hand deserves to be discussed widely, and I hope more people will comment. Thanks to the authors for bringing attention to the topic of how changing information economics relate to public information.
I agree with what I think is the paper’s basic proposal, which is not radical. The public would be well served if public information is made available for free and easy download in a structured format that can be re-used by third parties. Separating the data from the presentation software is smart practice.
It is my impression that, along the way to making this proposal, the authors are attacking the already weak parties—the agencies that struggle to collect the information we all want to use—and perhaps hurting their own cause in that way. The low barriers to entry for publishing globally on the web are new. Government agencies aren’t the only ones playing catch-up.
In the case of the government, there are agencies who have long done basically what the paper recommends; the U.S. Census, for example. What has changed is the economics of computing and communications that now makes individuals (rather than institutions with lots of resources – e.g., universities, large legal publishers) able to access, repurpose, and serve up the data. Expectations have changed (relatively) overnight. Change won’t happen overnight, but I don’t think that relinquishing any publishing role is going to speed up the process. Having said that, I agree that the agencies (and the Congress and OMB who oversee their operations) may need to be pushed, and perhaps The Invisible Hand paper can help with that push.
I am not sure if the authors (hello authors who are reading this!) are aware of a period that shaped the way many in the right-to-know community view the balance between government publishing public information and third parties publishing public information. I dug up something on the web that summarizes the “Reagan and OMB Circular A-130” history: http://sunsite.utk.edu/FINS/Periodicals_and_Newspapers/Fins-PaN-21.txt
Patrice McDermott also provides useful background and insight on the “old A-130” issue in chapter 2 of her book Who Needs to Know? [978-1-59888-050-2]. Take a look at it, and you’ll see why some of us get a little nervous about proposals for government to cede their publishing role to third parties.
The authors have a tough challenge in trying to address “government information” –judicial, legislative, executive -- as a monolith. Individual data sets may not be available in the free, downloadable, structured way we’d like to see for a variety of reasons. Some reasons are political, some are meant to favor commercial enterprises, some depend on standards development still in progress, and some may be just because the agency is so understaffed they can’t make the small push to get there. Oversimplifying the problem could slow down our progress toward the solution.
At this point, I hope I am not sounding too critical because I do support the public provision of public data in standard formats. But, I think the authors overestimate the capabilities of third parties for providing free, neutral, 24x7 access to authenticated public information to all for the lifetime of the data or the republic. Third parties have a big role. They can add value, meet the needs of disparate audiences, combine government data with copyrighted data, etc. The playing field among third parties should be leveled to encourage this innovation, but there is no need to level – or even hobble -- the government information providers to do so.
Peggy
For this you could look at it the way we did in the open government data
doc--- It's not saying what should be public, but if it's going to be
public then here's how you know you did it right.
Daniel Bennett wrote:
> I think that
> it is unnecessary for the writers to create a dichotomy of functional
> sites and homepages versus structured data if they better understood
> how sites can be developed.
If a website can share data and provide an interface at once, all the
more power to the developers. But the dichotomy --- not between XML and
HTML but between allocating resources to share data and resources to
providing an interface --- is the whole point; it's what says that such
a dual use is important.
--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)
While I agree that the people who care tend to think it's someone
else's problem, it's possible that they just haven't had the right
tools for getting involved. :-)
I think you've misunderstood the point of that imperative.
Putting my PhD student hat on for a change, it is common to see that in
drafts of scholarly publications. My understanding is that it is
directed at academics warning them that the draft is subject to revision
before it is published in the journal, and that one should not cite the
draft in other academic works as if it were the final publication
because the final publication could differ in crucial ways from the
draft. If that happens, the citation would be incorrect.
I've never thought it was intended to stifle discussion.
Unless you were putting the emphasis on "literally", and in which case I
would not only have to put my student hat on, but my linguistics hat as
well. :)