This is an extension and part 2 to Michael Gurstein’s earlier critique, that covers the same ground of pointing out the insuffiency of a mere open data approach (the equivalent of ‘build it and they will come”):
Excerpt without links, the original discusses examples to make the point.
Dan McQuillan:
“Open data doesn’t empower communities. I’m not saying open data is a bad thing, but we need to highlight the gap between the semantic web and social impact. Otherwise we’ll continue to get swept along on a tide of technocratic enthusiasm where hope lies in ‘a flood of data to create a data-literate citizenry’.
I’m inspired by the idea that nuggets of opened data could seed guerilla public services, plugging gaps left by government, but i don’t see any of that in the data.gov.uk apps list. The reasons aren’t technical but psychosocial – the people and communities who could use this data to help tackle their own disadvantage and marginalisation don’t have the self-confident sense of entitlement that makes for successful civic hacktivism.
So why the big push behind open data and the lack of interest in enabling communities? i think the crude answer is ‘bread and circuses’. And anyway, opening up data is a technocrat friendly activity whereas empowering communities is messy and difficult. So we’ll continue to be told that we can improve public services and create future economic growth by linking data rather than tackling power.
There are many missing steps between open data & an empowered citizenry that can fulfill David Cameron’s claim that “People will be the masters. Politicians the servants. And that’s the way it should be”. It might be useful to contrast the histories of libraries and of Chartism – libraries are a necessary platform for an informed citizenry, but it takes the channeled anger of a social movement to focus that in to historic change.
So which path leads beyond the sterility of SPARQL queries? Part of me says forget the whole thing. In a past life i helped collect data for the NHS, so i know that most government data is fake anyway (massaged beyond recognition as it passes upwards through the layered sphincters of bureaucracy). I’ll keep an open mind to the results of the Open Data Impacts survey but i think we should sound the alarm that open data risks becoming (as Becky Hogge says) a kind of cargo cult.
The real struggle, as ever, is on the terrain of meanings. Who will write the narrative that we inhabit? And how much does data actually help here?”
The argument that open data might lead to the unintended consequence of a “data divide” and “empowering the empowered” reinforces my belief that information can only be free when we are free; that open data under the current economic regime would only be co-opted by elites; and that data can and should only be open within whatever part of the economy is created by and belongs to an egalitarian community.
The strategy is simple: boycott the old economy (starve the beast) and build a new one in which information is open and free. But there is no way to build a new economy without many hands wielding picks and shovels, bricks and mortar (or maybe even stones, straw and mud). Simple but not easy. There are no tricks or easy strings to pull.
A “Green New Deal” might be helpful, but noting is essential but the number of bodies and minds that will stop working for “the man” and start working for themselves.
When we are free, information will be too.
PR
Poor Richard’s Almanack 2010