I spent a fascinating weekend at Foocamp – an annual gathering of those at the frontier of technology change and innovation. The current economic environment and the implications for New Zealand was the backdrop to a lot of the discussion, and there were heated debates on a number of controversial areas, including section 92A of the Copyright Act, and government broadband investment plans (in both cases there was more heat than light). For me, one of the more interesting themes of the weekend was publishing and indexing of information, and the relationship between transparency and trust.
Government has huge volumes of non-personal information which has been funded by public money. If these resources were more freely available, they could be used by motivated individuals to create value – both personal value and economic value. A specific example is geotagging - the process of adding geographical identification to government data and other content, to provide extra information about location. These geotags can then be used to understand the relationships between different pieces of data.
Work being done by museums and libraries is creating a deluge of digital information, and often access to these assets is reduced because of the challenges of indexing. Professionals in libraries, museums and archives institutions are adding these geotags to their published contents, but the time and effort is substantial.
Increasingly, government agencies can cooperate with the public to index, reference and tag resources. People are getting increasingly accustomed, through sites such as flickr and facebook, to the idea of tagging content – public institutions can use “crowdsourcing” as an alternative to doing it ouselves (what you might call crownsourcing).
These ideas also found their way into discussions on peer to peer financial services, and education – using social media tools as a foundation. The core unifying theme is that communities want to create value through the use of technology. While there are instances where professional expertise is needed to provide authoritative reference data, a government can respond in a more agile way by tapping into this enthusiasm. The UK Power of Information Task Force has released its current report as a beta version for comment. For an example from here in NZ, look at Digital New Zealand
In the new, fiscally constrained environment, government agencies can think laterally about connecting with the wider community, freeing up data for use and re-use by the public, and operating in a more transparent fashion. This openness will lead to an increase in trust between government and people.
2 Comments
Laurence - re: public tagging of government material. I gave a presentation which touched on this subject to SSC’s Participation CoP in March 2007. The presentation is on the CoP’s wiki. One of the major hurdles to overcome in taking forward public tagging of government documents is government’s ‘pain threshold’ when idiots/vandals add ‘naughty’ words to the tags for a government document. There are resource implications in terms of going around cleaning up after them, and/or moderating the adding of tags in the first place. But given the potential for adding value, I think it is an idea worth exploring in more detail.
Your comments about greater openness leading to an increase in trust between government and people are welcome. However, there is already a rich discourse about transparency and trust, in amongst which there is a thread that makes a persuasive case that greater transparency can lead to less trust (see Onora O’Neill’s Reith Lectures in 2002). I would say in response that there is a strong argument that says it is not just the basic level of openness that matters, but how government reacts to any errors/misfeance revealed as result of the openness. If it acts in such a way as to address the problem and enhance accountability and/or the ability to participate, levels of trust may increase. If it acts to ’shoot the messenger’ or reduce pre-existing openness, levels of trust may well decrease. This comes down to the stance and culture of politicians and senior public service managers, and is ultimately what we mean when we talk about a ‘culture of openness’.
Thanks for the comment Andrew. The Leith lectures are an interesting commentary on the relationships between trust and transparency. I personally remain convinced that “sunlight is the best antiseptic”, but it is important that transparency is authentic. My reading of Onora O’Neill’s lectures is that she is observing the practice of transparency has resulted in some unforeseen consequences.