Post in Article - Government Data and the Invisible Hand

Jun 06 21:37 UTC

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.