US public rightly sceptical of Obama's suggestion box

WIRED:The US government is asking citizens what data it should make available – but it should be left to independent bodies to decide, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

GENERALLY SPEAKING, government bureaucrats aren’t particularly motivated to provide data on their actions to the outside world – especially not in a form that computers in general, and the internet in particular, can understand. Most prefer to keep their data, as the immortal Douglas Adams had it, “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’ ”.

The Obama administration, however, was elected on a platform of openness, transparency, a certain implied level of technical competence, and no obvious leopards. In December, as part of that openness agenda, it directed all its officers to open up as much data as possible through a government-wide “Open Government Directive”.

As part of the directive, each executive agency, from agriculture to Nasa to the Department of Homeland Security, was instructed to request ideas online for what, exactly, it should provide – and respond to those suggestions in a timely manner.

The problem, as Clay Johnson of transparency advocacy group the Sunshine Foundation says, is that the Great American Public doesn’t seem to have that many ideas. It’s been over two months since the Open Government Directive was launched, and the entire Federal government has received only 600 or so ideas.

Tech thinker Tim O’Reilly was even blunter than Johnson, saying that he was “really disappointed that the American public and the tech community at large aren’t taking advantage of this window of opportunity”. He worries that in another month, the government will be able to say that they asked the public for transparency suggestions, and didn’t get any.

The more sceptical government-watchers might suggest that this is exactly what the government bureaucrats planned all along. The one thing that saves most government departments from adequate oversight is that few people care what they do. If anyone does, suddenly, care, the department bureaucracy instinctively learns that it has done something wrong and goes about making sure that people care less – or at least, that they can no longer find details on anything worth caring about. I’m not quite as cynical as that. I spent some time in the 1990s working on government transparency projects, although they were rather more guerrilla than Obama’s directive. Instead of responding to consultations, my colleagues wrote computer scripts in the middle of the night that would rip through the unintelligible data stored on public websites, and transform it into data that people really could use – most notably, rewiring the UK’s parliamentary debates website into “They Work For You”, a usable and searchable index of what lawmakers had said.

The parliamentarians were rather annoyed, but the project became useful so quickly to so many people that it was almost impossible for them to have it shut down.

In the end, the lawmakers found themselves using it, and at that point, They Work For You became hard-wired into the UK political system. It turns out that a bureaucracy’s tendency to preserve what is useful for its own purposes is a force that you can use for good as well as evil.

All this was before any government had really understood the power and the risks attached with putting open, transparent, usable data online. These days, they understand all too well – which I think, sadly, greatly limits its impact.

Consciously or unconsciously, governments have a long history of surrounding real news with useless data: in the old days it was in vast unread reports. In the early days of the web, it was encasing information in unreadable data files.

Nowadays, I believe, the trick will be to drown us in data – none of which will include the real nuggets that we are eager to find.

My partner-in-crime in those outlaw days of data liberation, the entrepreneur Stefan Magdalinski, boiled down this observation into what has become (in my head at least), Magdalinski’s Law of Openness and Transparency: “Any data that the government wants you to see isn’t worth looking at.”

I suspect that some innate understanding by the public of Magdalinski’s Law is what drives the distinct lack of contributions to the Open Government Directive. None of the US agencies in this public call for ideas has any obligation to follow up on the suggestions. Any that they do will almost certainly be harmless and uncontroversial. Any that are potentially dangerous will be ignored – or worse, used to flag potential future demands that must be evaded at all costs.

I realise that such statements must sound somewhat corrosive to those who sincerely believe that an executive can make itself transparent simply by becoming more internet-savvy. But there’s a reason why modern democracies have a separation of powers. It’s not a question of secretive or corrupt officials: it’s a question of incentives. Those doing the opening have to be separate from those being opened up. And they need real, independent powers to do so.

And a grand plan for an internet suggestion box simply doesn’t cut it.