The Freedom of Information Act and City Wikis
me
identically named Act, it probably has significant differences between
the UK Act.
I won't go into detail about the UK Act, refer to the Wikipedia
article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_2000
It would be helpful if someone from the US could adapt this post to
reflect the situation over there.
The purpose of this post is to highlight freedom of information
legislation's potential for furnishing city wikis with information.
Governments, local authorities and other state institutions generate a
massive amount of data and information. A large amount of this could
be published without compromising anyone's privacy, however very
little of it is published without prompting. Presumably, this is
because these institutions don't want scrutiny. This is somewhat
understandable, I know I do a better job at work if I don't have to
worry about someone scrutinising every aspect of my work, but on the
same balance, if there was no oversight, then how would anyone know I
was doing my job? So all of the information may not be in the public
interest, but none is even less in the public interest.
I think that city wikis combined with the FOI Act, can help to form a
happy medium between the two poles.
In gathering information to relevant our articles using the FOI Act,
we are in many ways, selecting what information is of interest and
useful to the public. The state is obliged to release the
data/information to us and we can publish it either in its full or
summarised form. This information then becomes very easily accessible
rather than accessible by a potentially month long formal request.
Whether or not, the wiki in question has neutral point of view policy,
I think that it is crucial that we as editors consider how our
opinions can affect the way that we present the facts. We should work
to open as much data and information up to the public in the least
biased way possible. We should be balanced -- I don't mean that we
have to present both sides as equal if they are not, but we certainly
shouldn't be one sided. If possible though, we should be nothing at
all.
Take the following hypothetical situation: Your local council spends
£10,000 on replacing all of the benches in a public park. I can be
presented in many ways.:
1. Council spends £10,000 on replacing benches
2. Council _wastes_ £10,000 on replacing benches
3. Council spends £10,000 on providing seating in a much used public
park, costing only £100 per bench
4. Council spends £10,000 on renovating public park
5. Council spends £10,000 (that's £100 per bench) on replacing benches
in public park
As you can see, there is a large difference in the way that a sentence
can influence a reader. I am suggesting that we should adopt the
following informal policy points when representing data rather than
reported public opinion:
* statements should be specific (statement 1 not statement 4)
* statements should be neutrally worded (statement 1 not statement 2)
* statements should be made easy to understand and harder to
misinterpret (statement 5 not statement 1)
I think also it is usually better to be positive if you can't be neutral.
I have used the Freedom of Information Act in a couple of articles to
make them more informative (see the references):
* http://en.bmthwiki.org/wiki/Bournemouth_Echo
* http://en.bmthwiki.org/wiki/Quay_Advice_Centre
My requests were quite small, but this could also be done for larger data sets.
In the UK, there is a great tool for making FOI requests and
publishings them. It is cited in my references. WhatDoTheyKnow.com. I
don't know whether there is anything similar in the USA.
Thoughts?