Open Data in Lebanon
We, as human beings have been recording data since the beginning of civilization. Yet today, our data is being constantly recorded and has become an immense data base that could help us understand and study certain behaviors and trends. A few years back, a lot of the data recorded was not accessible to anyone, yet now, a new concept has emerged; Open Data. People have increasingly noticed the fact that having access to data bases is a very important factor of our society today, since after all we are our data and we have the right to access it. Open data promises access to data bases to ensure transparency, through having this access, and accountability, to hold the government accountable (Jannsen, 2012). Also, open data can lead to participatory governance, which consists of having citizen participate in decisions that the government take and be able to have a more active role in them (Jannsen, 2012). Finally, this open data could help with innovation; through access people will learn more about trends and behaviors, and could start building upon that to create better public services.
In Lebanon, open data policy is going to start being implemented. Recently, the parliament ratified the law of access to information. This step could help our country develop and could help achieve informed participation in decisions in many sectors. One issue that exists in Lebanon is the issue of water. Our water reserves are slowly depleting, or are polluted or contaminated by microbes. This issue is extremely important and having access to information on how it is going to be managed or what the quality of water in each region is could help people do an initiative to remedy this crisis. We need to have access to this kind of environmental information in Lebanon since it is a question of life or death. This information will be able to help educate people on this situation, and make them see how important and real this issue is. Another sector where open data could be useful is the economic sector; we need to know how our taxes are being distributed and where is our money going. As a population, we can more or less agree on which sector our tax money is going. If people have open access to this information, a voting process could ensure that most of the population agrees on what sector needs to be financed more. Also, our history shows that there has been a lot of corruption in our government, our tax money has been used to finance government officials instead of other things, and this should also be transparent in order to hold accountable whomever was the perpetrator so that people do not make the same mistake and vote for them. Finally, we should have access to historical documents that date from the Lebanese independence until today. There are a lot of holes in our history today. Most of what we know about the history and wars after the French mandate are communicated to the youth by parents and/or surroundings. This is very dangerous since our history has become subjective. We have no basis to our historical knowledge which continues this underlying separation that Lebanese people have between each other. Having facts and teaching them in schools could help these deeply rooted segregation that we are living.
Yet even these benefits we cannot be sure of. First of all, not everyone has the intellectual or technical ability to access this information, and that could reinforce the social inequalities that exist in our country (Johnson, 2014). This unequal access could result in unequal participation in decisions which reinforces disparities and results in under-representation of social groups. Also, other problems that could be encountered are the restrictions that could be put on certain information under the excuse of national security or under intellectual property rights (Access Info Europe and the Open Knowledge Foundation, 2011), and this could be the case with our history. Since our history is seen as information that is extremely sensitive, we could have restricted access to it. Also, if certain documents are written by a Politian or someone else, we could half the problem of copy rights. Also, information such as a new Lebanese census could also be restricted since as Dr. Maya Mikdashi explained, the French census was faulty and certain groups might have been under-represented. This could lead to also another security problem since the whole government would have to change.
In my opinion, these risks are not worth withholding the information. History, for example, should be an objective subject and should be accessible to all. Maybe this information should be implemented slowly instead of it being brusquely available which could lessen any type of impact. Also having information and learning how to access and use it implemented in schools or education in general could lessen the impact this information could have on our society.
References
Access Info Europe and the Open Knowledge Foundation (2011). Beyond Access: Open Government Data and the Right to (Re)use Public Information, p.38
Janssen, K. (2012). Open Government Data and the Right to Information: Opportunities and Obstacles. The Journal of Community Informatics,8(02).
Johnson, J. A. (2014). From Open Data to Information Justice. Ethics and Information Technology,16(04), 263–274.
