Article - Government Data and the Invisible Hand
From:
Steven Clift
Date:
Jun 06 21:37 UTC
Short link
While I disagree with the premise that government agencies have an
either or choice - a great, usable website OR providing access to the
underlying data so third parties can make better use of it and
ultimately deliver it to more people, it highlights a ground swell of
interest among a new generation of digital democracy builders knocking
on the doors of power. In short, I expect that we will see public
database after database open its back doors by choice to secure
competitive relevancy in the eyes of the public and legislative funders
or by force through the rule of law. - Steven Clift
See:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1138083
Subject: Paper: "Government Data and the Invisible Hand"
Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:53:48 -0400
From: Josh Tauberer <tauberer@govtrack.us>
To: <email obscured>, <email obscured>
Open House and Open Gov Data friends,
The guys over at Princeton's new Center for Information Technology
Policy wrote a really great paper for the Yale Journal of Law &
Technology on the role data should have, compared to websites, in
government. It articulates a point that I think many of us
subconsciously have had in mind:
"The new administration should specify that the federal government’s
primary objective as an online publisher is to provide data that is
easy for others to reuse, rather than to help citizens use the data in
one particular way or another."
And they suggest an interesting way to push that forward:
"The policy route to realizing this principle is to require that
federal government websites retrieve the underlying data using the
same infrastructure that they have made available to the public. Such
a rule incentivizes government bodies to keep this infrastructure in
good working order, and ensures that private parties will have no less
an opportunity to use public data than the government itself does. The
rule prevents the situation, sadly typical of government websites
today, in which governmental interest in presenting data in a
particular fashion distracts from, and thereby impedes, the provision
of data to users for their own purposes."
I think this is a worthwhile addition to the opengovdata and
publicmarkup.org policy documents --- if not as a direct recommendation
(because I think it may be too much to ask for in a grand form) then
noted as a long-term goal or (in terms of the second paragraph I quoted)
as a benchmark, a concrete way to tell whether data is open.
The full citation is: Robinson, David, Yu, Harlan, Zeller, William P and
Felten, Edward W, "Government Data and the Invisible Hand" (2008). Yale
Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 11, 2008
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1138083
I've gotten David, the first author (ehm, and long-time friend), to join
both of these lists, and he's interested in helping hash out good policy
recommendations with us.
--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us
http://razor.occams.info
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)
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