Why the “Open Data Movement” is a Joke

If you're purely interested in holding government accountable for their actions, I can see why you might write this. A lot of the open data released has been things that will benefit entities other than political campaign groups.

Consider data on train positions in the UK. It's been locked up in various ways for a long time, or at least with restrictions that amount to non-commercial usage. So what you ask? Providing a live train-times service from the data costs money: I've been told it's upwards of 500 messages/second and there's a lot of problems you have to work around.

Releasing the data behind it is starting to help people to find cheaper tickets, make a more truthful record of train punctuality than official figures, etc. Many companies will benefit financially from this (rather than the current monopoly) but the public will benefit.

There are cases where accountability is at least starting to be possible. Last year I helped a newspaper look at published NHS data for things buried under the carpet - think hospitals that are failing to treat certain age groups for conditions like Diabetes. That's accountability. The UK pupil database is similarly promising.

Things need to get better but it's not as bad everywhere as the author claims of Canada or the USA.

This is balderdash and largely character assassination.

The author's post contains essentially two points:

- "Open Data hasn't resulted in 100% government transparency"

- "There are corporate influences in the open data movement, therefor the open data movement are just corporate sockpuppets"

These two points are ridiculous on their face.

Movements are things that take time. They are a process. They require citizen engagement, advocacy, and political pressure. The fact that the open data movement hasn't radically altered the way that politics are done in Canada (or the location of your choosing) does not mean that progress is not being made, or that we shouldn't stop demanding better data and better accountability.

Second, if one is to write off any movement with a corporate interest, we may as well give up on the open source software movement. That a company like O'Reilly views open data as worth their time and attention does not mean that they wield undue influence over the subject material of what it is that people work on or wish to achieve. I would love to hear any accounts of O'Reilly or ESRI or Microsoft or Omidyar killing or interfering with projects because they disagree with them.

The notion that open data is some how tainted by corporate touches is also so freaking frustrating because there already are businesses built around open data that everyone uses.

Is government weather data somehow suspect because the Weather Channel has built a business around it? Should we block someone from building a business like the Weather Channel on government data? If so why? It's freaking open data, it's not like the Weather Channel controls it.

Having been involved with several open government initiatives in the past five years, both as a consumer and as a consultant to municipal governments trying to to take positive action. I can understand the frustration and anger that such initiatives can provoke. And how it's almost worse when an initiative almost completes it's aim but is perverted by incidental contact with some outside agenda.

That said, any politician who attempts to rig the national census is an idiot. Yes it may win your party momentary advantage this year, but at the cost of causing the government to abandon the reality principle altogether. I'd go so far as to say that doing away with accurate data gathering and attempting to suborn demographic statistics to meet political goals is a pathological symptom of the Beige Fascism [1] failure mode of representative democracy.

1. See Charles Stross's excellent summary of the issue http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/politica...

I'm not sure what the point of this article is. There's nothing wrong with governments providing their data in standardized machine readable formats. This makes it easier for groups of informed citizens, hackers looking for a side project, and non profits like CFA to process and visualize this data. They then can create tools to make it easier for citizens to see and understand what is going on 'under the hood'.

It's ludicrous that governments should keep the data about what they are doing with our taxes locked inside proprietary enterprise databases. Oftentimes, the only information available is a small subset or overview released once a year as a PDF. Anything more usable and parseable is a big improvement on this.

It's true, governments will start by only releasing things that make them look good (or at least not bad). But this is not the end goal. Eventually the stuff that they don't release becomes glaringly obvious and people start asking why.

The author has what sound like some valid complaints about the Canadian government. But somehow he thinks it's logical to conflate these issues with the entire open data movement. I don't get it.

For example, politicians will sometimes justify bad laws by claiming that they are 'for the children'. This article is the equivalent of complaining about these laws by saying 'children are a joke'. Nice straw man.

I can see both sides of this argument.

We should all note, however, that when the establishment appropriates the language of the upstarts and insurgents the aim is often to disenfranchise the movement while paying lip service to that movement's original aims.

How to counter this? Not a simple question. That said, once government promises "open data" or "open government" it might be time to think up a new (more pressing) demand with a new slogan to boot.

Crooked Timber put together a series of essay about open data last summer discussing these issues in more depth (including one by Aaron Swartz):

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/17/open-data-seminar-2/

What does open data have to do with small government? What does the Liberal government firing Canadian scientists in 2004 have to do with open data? What does the Canadian Association of Journalists have to do with open data?

Content-free political spew makes me sad. This doesn't belong on HN.