Open Data, Open Process

Governments love data. Nothing new about this. Data collected for financial reasoning (at the time) is a very helpful tools for today's historians.

Now, however, we don't seem to want to wait 900-2,400 years for this data. This want of open data, can have unwelcome consequences, warn both Danah Boyd and Lawrence Lessig. While both are not opposed to transparency and open data, both quote examples where they feel individuals privacy and freedom might be compromised by exposure, due to bad openness policies. Both also note that the influx of data can be manipulated to provide misleading interpretations of the data.

I think this is an incomplete view of the benefits of open data. The value of open data is not only in the raw data researching tools such as gapminder or Worlfram Alpha, or for storing it in the internet archives for future historians. Access to this data also allows us to question the processes and policies leading to the collection and use of this data.

This is happening not only in government data, but in other areas, such as the debate in the Open vs. Closed systems. The debate is usually around the question of whether or not the availability of the source code is detrimental or advantageous to software security. Once more, I think the code is only a part of the picture. It is the process of reporting, tracking and fixing the security issues that is paramount. In open source software, the correction of an identified security issue is even a more accessible process then changing the policy that makes government open data a possible danger to the individual.

In this line of reasoning I think open data can have two primary benefits: It can be use to force policy makers to make their decision making processes more open, and it can be used to promote better education. Since the data can be accesses, curated and analyzed by many, it give much more people an insensitive to educated themselves and derive value from this data.