Persuading the Gatekeepers
A top-down approach to launching an open government data initiative
The Asotin County Library (ACL), located in the southeast corner of Washington State, is leading an open government data initiative. In addition to its geographic superlatives, Asotin County is the smallest jurisdiction in the state to launch such a project. At the county level, Asotin’s estimated population is just under 22,500 people (OFM, 2017), about half the size of the next smallest municipality in Washington that is openly publishing civic data. While this scale may seem approachable in terms of data quantity, rural areas often have less access to resources. Therefore, attempting an open data initiative in a small community is extremely valuable and deceptively complex. In this post, I will discuss some early challenges we encountered and common concerns voiced by Asotin County’s local officials.
Education and Advocacy
Representatives of the Washington State Library presented to government project partners in November of 2018. In March, the initiative’s organizers offered a Data Equity for Main Street course to introduce open data concepts to local officials. Next, semi-formal interviews of department heads were conducted to gauge concern and understanding of open civic data. When I joined the project in April, we expected to have access to local data and begin the publishing process — it hasn’t progressed quite how we anticipated.
The first step was to reach out to a list of department heads who had attended ACL’s open data literacy course, expressed interest in the project, or both. My intention was to establish my existence for the purposes of dataset delivery; but as these initial emails graduated to introductory phone calls, it was clear that what began as a data curation project had swiftly become a carefully navigated campaign to build relationships, educate the wardens of local civic data, and advocate for data sharing.
Communicating Public Interest
A significant struggle that was articulated in interviews with partners was how to justify publishing data that the public presumably has no interest in using. In her discussion of government transparency, Moore (2018) theorized that transparency equates to “filing information in a virtual space to which the public have been permitted access” (p. 421). This understanding of transparency doesn’t mandate usage quotas, neither does open government data publishing. Thus, is it fair to claim that beyond prioritizing publication progression, use projections should have no bearing on whether or not data is published openly?
A common method of measuring public interest in civic data is to audit public records requests and analyze them by subject. This practice reveals trends in information seeking that often correlate to events — arrests, accidents, ballot measures — that pique public interest. It’s natural to assume that if a limited number of public records requests are produced for certain information, then public interest is proportionately limited. However, we must consider the sizable effort disparity between filing an official public records request and the few keystrokes needed to access data from an open data portal.
Context is Reality
Not all data is complimentary. Data can be neutral, shocking, and interpretable. It’s easy to understand why government leaders are inclined to interpret data before public release. If read without context, crime and incident statistics may depict a region as a high crime area. By publishing the pre-summary data used to calculate those crime statistics, the public has access to the big picture and is able to conclude that the region’s higher-than-average incidents of theft are concentrated in a large commercial-retail zone, not residential neighborhoods.
However, is the risk of misinterpretation a justified cause for restricting access to aggregated data? Or, is the threat of misinterpretation minimized by providing as much original context as possible?
Trust is a Two-Way Street
It’s understood that publishing data in a way that facilitates exportation, reuse, and sharing will raise questions of data integrity. If just anyone has access to a copy of the budget spreadsheet, couldn’t they manipulate values and misrepresent the City’s finances? While there are conflicting accounts that government transparency truly boosts perceived trustworthiness, making the data available that drives civic decision-making will provide a pathway to increased community engagement.
As government leaders are entrusted and enabled by their communities to capture and report accurate data, so should these government leaders trust their community members to accurately interpret and use public data.
Start Slow, Check-in Often
In the week following these introductory meetings, I sent debriefing notes to each interviewee. These notes expressed our gratitude for their time and support, reiterated the purpose of the open data project, and confirmed our interest in attaining any datasets that were discussed in the interviews as possible starting points.
I recognize that our data partners will determine the pace at which this project progresses. So far, I’ve focused primarily on meeting officials who serve on the city-level. Now that our purposes are clear, my next steps are to expand our relationship-building campaign to include the unincorporated areas of Asotin County while maintaining frequent contact with city officials.
References
Moore, Sarah. (2018). Towards a sociology of institutional transparency: openness, deception and the problem of public trust. Sociology, 52(2), 416–430. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038516686530
State of Washington, OFM (Office of Financial Management), Forecasting & Research Division. (2017). 2018 population trends. Retrieved from https://www.ofm.wa.gov/sites/default/files/public/dataresearch/pop/april1/ofm_april1_poptrends.pdf
