Some thoughts on Tisne-Barder-Gate
There’s been an interesting little dust-up in the government transparency and accountability scene today. It starts here, with a tweet from Owen Barder, about a post by Martin Tisne, and carries on in about 30 different interesting directions. I’m afraid that this isn’t a post summarising that debate (other than to note that it was a bit white-dudalicious) but I think it’s fair to say that the question at hand was to what extent governments actively should try to work out what data should be released, versus having a ‘release it all’ policy. This is a major hobby horse of mine, so I thought I’d write some thoughts that require more space than Twitter allows. In order:
1- Well-governed countries deploy a variety of mechanisms to help them to choose how to deploy or allocate resources, because almost all resources are scarce.
2 — Releasing any kind of data requires governments to expend some of their scarce resources.
3 — Consequently, any well-run government considering releasing any data has to work out some mechanism or policy that helps it work out how many resources are worth spending on this policy priority (i.e releasing data), versus others (i.e buying missiles). The mechanism also has to determine what order to deploy resources in, as well as the total resources that are deemed justifiable to allocate on this problem.
4 —So any meaningful open data policy, including ‘release everything without discrimination’, must ultimately involve a mechanism for choosing and prioritising both what the spending cap is to be on the whole project, and in what order to execute the releases.
5- Since choice is unavoidable, there is a legitimate debate to be had on how that choice is arrived at. This, I suspect is where people may have different views that have driven the excitement and debate this afternoon. My own view is that a FOIA-esque mechanism is most desirable, whereby the priorities are set by members of the public exert rights. But I would very much like to hear what would shape the release policy of the many other voices I heard this afternoon.
