Does transparency mean more democracy?

November 1, 2011

President Barack Obama began his presidency with the goal of making the US government more transparent and “establishing a new standard of openness.” The website data.gov was expected to facilitate this transparency—providing access to copious government data on topics as varied as unemployment records and hospital Medicare costs and enabling everyone with access to the Internet to scrutinize the priorities of the government.

Data.gov was launched on May 21, 2009, and within a month, the website had linked to over 100,000 data sets. Since its launch, the website’s content has quadrupled, now containing almost 390,000 data sets—a number that continues to grow daily. Seventeen government agencies—from the Department of Agriculture to NASA—are currently publishing their information on the website.

Data.gov was the beginning of an open-data movement that has proliferated around the globe. Twenty-one countries have so far at least partially opened up their data for public use. Germany offers environmental monitoring data that allows citizens to access air quality and radiation measurements. The city of Paris provides statistics about city libraries and construction permits. Yet only data.gov.uk, launched in January 2010, links to a data volume comparable to the United State’s Data.gov.

In the United States, the open-data movement has also spread to state, county, and city levels. Twenty-nine states and eleven cities have published data resources online. In September 2011, Cook County, Illinois, launched its data portal, lookatcook.com. Cook County Commissioner John Fritchey wanted to visualize the county’s spending patterns in a way that was easy to understand for the average resident. Lookatcook.com offers simple charting tools in addition to downloadable raw data. Using this online resource, Chicagoans are now able to track of the county’s spending patterns. Complementing the data available at the county level, the website chicago.everyblock.com allows users to search for crimes recorded by the Chicago Police Department according to address or zip code.

But does having more data available to more people really mean greater democracy? And is quantitative analysis being used beyond academic circles?

Researchers are only beginning to understand the impact open data will have on the democratization of government and the exchange of information. Several emerging scholars are questioning the implications of open data. Sociologist Tim Davies analyzed the user patterns of data.gov.uk for his dissertation research. Davies attended open-data conferences, interviewed users, and conducted online surveys to find out who uses government data and for what purposes. According to Davies, users of open data in the UK were not aimlessly browsing the data but had specific questions that they were trying to answer with the help of certain data sets. Davies also found that the most common use of open data was not the actual analysis of data sets, but rather the reposting of datasets in a more user-friendly format. The Guardian, for example, developed Coins—a tool that filters the data by year and government department.

Journalists are taking advantage of this new resource to improve their reportage. In the United States, the New York Times used open government data in their award-winning toxic water project. Journalists used data from open Environmental Protection Agency records to expose violators of the Clean Water Act. Internet journalist Alex Howard, correspondent for the O’Reilly Radar, even argued in an article on “the growing importance of data journalism” that analyzing and managing data sets will become an integral part of journalism in the immediate future.

Homepage image by Flickr user Opensourceway