Avoiding moral high grounds

[bill.anderson]

I have been following the discussion on privacy and had started drafting a reply there, but the point I want to make is a broader one.

There may well be an array of political and moral arguments that lead to the creation of a standard, but as soon as one starts to actually build the standard itself - particularly a voluntary one - you need to leave this baggage outside.

From my experience advising a range of institutions on publishing to IATI I've learnt to accept the intentions and commitments of every publisher, or potential publisher, in good faith. The adoption of open data standards inevitably strengthens weak institutions and this is a journey that every publisher commits themselves - in my view in good faith.

There can well be legal, bureaucratic and cultural blockages along the road and I am all too aware of political blockages getting in the way of commitments to improve data quality. But it is not the standard that fixes these - rather the credibility of peer pressure that hopefully establishes itself as the standard matures.

Standards like IATI, EITI and OpenContracting cannot police themselves, they can only describe best practice. They are not about combating corruption and the abuse of power. They are about transparency and accountability. It may be a fine distinction, but from where I sit when it comes to achieving real progress it is a big one.

Best

Bill

[Sarah Bird]

Thanks for that Bill. That was really nicely put.

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[John Jordan]

There can be legitimate reasons to suppress supplier information. For example, suppliers could be the target of harassment based on what they are supplying the government. Further argument to follow the good faith model I think as its likely not realistic to a priori determine what is a "legitimate" suppression reason and what is not.

J

https://buyandsell.gc.ca/procurement-data
Gov of Canada open procurememnt data.

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[Tim Davies]

Thanks Bill - this is really valuable contribution.

I agree that standards cannot be self-policing: they clearly need external pressure for that.

I wonder if the idea of 'designing for tussle' is relevant here (see http://www.fipedia.org/fipedia/index.php?title=Design_for_Tussle and http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/PubPDFs/Tussle2002.pdf). In open contracting there are clearly going to be different interests at stake, and so any standard should support a tussle for better practices and ultimately best practice, whilst being accommodating of people on the journey towards that.

The idea Jeni raised in the technical scoping (https://github.com/open-contracting/technical-approach) off allowing Communities of Practice to declare the data that matters to them, might be one way of putting this into practice: showing how different communities require different levels of data depth and comprehensiveness to satisfy their needs...

All the best

Tim

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Tim Davies

Research Coordinator, Open Data Research Network

+44 7834 856 303

@timdavies | @odrnetwork | www.opendataresearch.org 

World Wide Web Foundation | 1110 Vermont Ave NW, Suite 500, Washington DC 20005, USA | www.webfoundation.org | Twitter: @webfoundation

[Bill Anderson]

Hi Tim

(Wouldn't it be nice if we could travel back in time to the start of the IATI standard design and have these conversations there ...!)

The key to Jeni's argument in my view is the separation of the (superset) data model from the implementation of the standard. The lack of this separation in IATI has been a major problem that rears its head in all kinds of ways.

I also agree that it is essential that a core subset is defined that is mandatory for all implementations AND that it is periodically reviewed as traction, credibility, momentum, etc improve. (In fact I agree with all of Jeni's approach)

Communities of Practice is an excellent idea. For the last year we have been working with development finance institutions building consensus on how equity and debt involving the private sector can be reported to IATI. There are many legal restrictions which have lowered the ambition of the consensus - but we have reached a best practice defined (in good faith) by the community itself. Peer pressure from the community will police implementation. Critics will argue that it is the standard's role to challenge and judge these limited ambitions. I disagree. Time and bigger politics will handle this.

I like the idea of ensuring that the data model design is modularised along tussle boundaries so that different implementations can be built using clean, unambiguous subsets. 

I suspect the biggest tussle, however, will be between publishers and users of the data and I don't think there is a technical solution for this. In the short-term (only) over-ambitious user demands can be a hindrance to a new standard gaining traction. The balance between letting publishers start with what is easy and immediately doable and users' demands for good quality data is a difficult one. Despite the problems caused by the huge amount of poor quality data still being published to the IATI standard, I remain of the opinion that the best approach for new publishers is "Publish what you can - Improve over time".

While there isn't a technical solution for this tussle, a technical description is possible: we should have started http://dashboard.iatistandard.org/ at the outset.

Best

Bill

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