Category Archives: open data

United Kingdom looks to put 50 million health records online and increase patient data rights

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This Monday, Minister of Parliament Jeremy Hunt, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Health, delivered a keynote address at the fourth annual Health Datapolooza in Washington, DC. In a rhetorical turn that would be anathema for any national conservative politician on this side of the Atlantic, Hunt commended the United States for taking steps towards providing universal health insurance to its people.

Hunt outlined three major elements in a strategy to improve health care in the UK: 1) applying data more effectively 2) improving transactional capabilities and 3) putting patients in the “driver’s seat” of their own health care. He pointed to several initiatives that support that strategy, from extending electronic health records to 50 million people to sequencing the genomes of 100,000 people and developing telemedicine capabilities for 3 million patients. Given the focus of the datapalooza, however, perhaps his most interesting statement came with respect to personal data ownership:

After the keynote, I interviewed Secretary Hunt and Tim Kelsey, the first national director for patients and information in the National Health Service. Our discussion, lightly edited, follows.

What substantive steps has the UK taken to actually putting health data in the hands of patients?

Hunt: Basically, I have given an instruction that everyone should be able to access their own health record online before the next general election, which means that I will be accountable for delivering that promise. There’s no wiggle room for me. That’s a big change, and it’s also a big change for the system because, basically, it means that every hospital and every general practitioner has to get used to the idea that the data they write about patients will be able to be accessed by patients. It’s a small but very significant first step.

There’s sometimes a disconnect between what politicians direct and what systems actually do. What’s happening with the UK’s long-delayed EHR system?

Hunt: I’ve given a pretty accountable timeframe for this: May 2015. I’ll be facing a general election campaign then. If we don’t deliver, then my head’s going to be on the block. I think it is a valid question, because of course once you set these objectives, then you start to look underneath it. One of the questions that we have to ask ourselves is how many have actually used this. We want everyone to be able to use this, but in practice, if the way they use it is they’re going to have to go into their GP, they’ve got to sign a consent form, there’s some complex procedure, then actually it’s not going to change people’s lives. The next question is about take-up, and that’s what we’re exploring at the moment.

Are there any aspects of the U.S. healthcare system that you think might be worth adopting and bringing back to the U.K.? Or vice versa?

Well, it’s quite interesting. We just had a really good meeting with [US CTO] Todd Park. I don’t think the differences are so great. I mean, on one level, yes, hospitals here are private or charitable, so they can’t be mandated by the government to do anything. And yet, they’ve succeeded in getting 80% of them to adopt EHRs through setting a standard and a certain amount of financial incentive. We can tell our hospitals to do things, but actually, as you said earlier, that’s not the same as them actually doing it.

I think in the end, in both countries, what you have to do is make it so that it’s in the hospitals’ own interest. In our case, the way that we’re doing that is trying to demonstrate that sensibly embracing the technology agenda has a massive effect on reducing mortality rates and improving clinical outcomes. By publishing all of the data about those outcomes, we’re creating competition between hospitals. That, I hope, will drive this agenda.

At the same time, we need to change public awareness. This is the big challenge – this sense that you can actually be in charge of your own health is just, surprisingly, absent in large numbers of people. There’s a very strong sense that lots of people have that “health is something that’s done to me” by NHS.

In the U.S has released data on the disparities in pricing for hospital procedures and comparisons of hospital quality — but you still need to go to places that take your health insurance. In the NHS, is that as much of an issue?

Hunt: That’s a really good question to ask because, in the U.K, for virtually any procedure, you have the right to have it done in any hospital in the country — and yet, very few people avail themselves of that right. So, by publishing surgical survival rates, we’re hoping to create pressure, where people actually say “I’m going to have this heart operation, and I’m not going to go to my local hospital, I’m going to go to this one a bit farther away that has higher success rates.” At the moment, people don’t actually do that; they tend to go where they’re recommended to. That’s where this information revolution can take hold.

What is the most unexpected thing that has happened since the U.K. began releasing more open data about health?

Tim Kelsey: I don’t know if this is unexpected or not, but the most startling thing is that we’ve moved from having one of the worst heart surgery survival rates in Europe to being the best. Heart surgery is the only speciality where we’ve published comparative data by heart surgeons across the whole country.

Do you think that’s an accident?

Tim Kelsey: No, I don’t think it’s an accident at all. Within that data, if you look at what has actually happened, the assumption of the geniuses who actually pioneered the program was that the gap between the best surgeons and the worst surgeons would narrow, because the weaker surgeons would raise their game. That didn’t happen. What happened was that the best surgeons got even better, and the underperforming surgeons also raised their game. The truth is that they want to be the winner, and open data has had a massive impact in driving outcomes and standards.

What are the most important principles or substantive steps that you’re applying at the NHS to mitigate risks or harms from privacy breaches?

Hunt: We have to carry the public with us. We have a very strong free press, as you do, and we’re very proud of that. If they believe that people’s data is going to be used to infringe their privacy, then public confidence in the huge revolution that the dataaplooza is all about will be shaken and lack a massive impact. I think that there’s a very simple way that you maintain public confidence, which is by making it absolutely clear that you own that data. You can choose, if you don’t want that data to be used, in even in an anonymized form, you can say I’m not going to share my data. I think once you do that, you create a discipline in the system to make sure that the anonymization of data is credible, because people can withdraw their consent if they don’t believe it.

Also, you put people in the driver’s seat, because I think people’s motives are different. You and I, as young and hopefully healthful individuals, we’re thinking about privacy. If somebody’s got terrible cancer, he’s actually thinking, ‘well, I would really like my data to be used for the benefit of humanity.’ They’re actually very, very happy to have their data shared. They have a different set of concerns.

I don’t think you’ll have any trouble, for example, getting 100,000 people to consent to have their genome sequenced. These will be people who have cancer, and once you have cancer, you think, ‘what can I do to help future generations conquer cancer?’ The mentality changes. We have to maintain people’s confidence.

I think the best analogy, though, is banking. Perhaps the second thing people care about most after their health is their money, and the banks have been able to maintain people’s confidence. They’re actually doing banking online, so that you can access your bank account from any PC, anywhere in the world. It’s something you can do with confidence. They’ve done that because they’ve thought through the procedures.

In the U.S., you’re entitled to access a free copy of your credit report once a year. Consumers, however, still don’t have access to their own data across much of the private sector. Will the British government support “rights to data for its citizens?”

Hunt:: We are hoping to preempt the worry about that by instructing the NHS that everyone has a right of veto over the use of their own data. You own your own medical record. If you don’t want that shared, then that’s your decision, and you’re able to do that. If we didn’t do that, I think the courts might make us do that.

Kelsey: Just to clarify that point: The Data Protection Act, which is effectively a European piece of legislation, says that people have the right to object to data being shared, in any context, private sector or health or otherwise, or to opt out. We’ve said, because of the rights priority we’re giving to patients as the de facto owner of the data, which is different from the American situation so far.

We’re setting a global standard here, which will be interesting experiment for the rest of the world to watch, that people will have the right to say “I don’t want my data shared” — and people will respect that. Now, at the moment that is not a legal right, that is a de facto right that will be expected. It may well be that we’ll need to simply write down a law that this is an individual’s data and rights flow from that. At the moment, there’s no law that gives an individual patient the right to their own data nor to opt out out of its sharing.

Proposed fracking rule from Interior Department needs more liquid data

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A proposed rule on hydraulic fracking from the United States Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management is now online. As of May 24, the comment period has begun, although the American Petroleum Institue is pressuring Interior to slow down the fracking rule.

You can read the proposed rule and comment at Regulations.gov, which was relaunched last year with an eye on public participation in rulemaking.

While the closely watched regulation has drawn qualified praise from the oil and gas industry, it includes a notable flaw with respect to how technology is used to oversee fracking. The Center for Effective Government is arguing that the BLM fracking rule violates the recent White House executive order on open data:

…instead of establishing a modern example of government information collection and sharing, BLM’s proposed rule would allow drilling companies to report the chemicals used in fracking to a third-party, industry-funded website, called FracFocus.org, which does not provide data in machine-readable formats. FracFocus.org only allows users to download PDF files of reports on fracked wells. Because PDF files are not machine-readable, the site makes it very difficult for the public to use and analyze data on wells and chemicals that the government requires companies to collect and make available.

Although FracFocus.org has recently improved some of its search features, the oil and gas industry opposes making chemical data easier to download or evaluate for fear that the public “might misinterpret it or use it for political purposes.” (subscription required) Citizens need to have adequate, accurate information about the chemicals they may be exposed to in order to evaluate the potential risks and rewards of allowing fracking in their communities.

“It is particularly disappointing that the first new information proposal since the open data executive order completely ignores the new requirements,” said Sean Moulton, Director of Open Government Policy at the Center for Effective Government. “This proposal doesn’t just fail to comply with the new open data policy, it represents a step in the wrong direction since it abdicates control of and access to the data to an industry website.”

Data formats aside, every person in a state where fracking is taking place should care about how it will be regulated, including the way information regarding which chemicals are used in the process.

This is an opportunity to play the role of an informed, engaged citizen that goes beyond a periodic visit to the ballot box every two years.

If you don’t and dislike the outcome, you may be left asking “why wasn’t I consulted?”

If you feel strongly, one way or the other, about fracking or federal oversight of industry, should it be approved and come to your state, there is literally no time better than than now to weigh in.

UPDATE: Kyle Smith, writing for the Sunlight Foundation, reports that the fracking debate has been extended until the end of the summer:

Under pressure from the oil industry, Interior Department Secretary Sally Jewell has extended the comment period on a controversial final “fracking” regulation by 60 days, promising two more months of maneuvering over a rule that, in its earlier incarnations, drew more than 177,000 public comments. The bulk of those appeared to be the product of letter-writing campaigns by environmental groups, according to analysis of comments on Sunlight’s Docket Wrench and conversations with agency officials.

Who are the open data entrepreneurs?

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reagan-quoteDay by day, we are gaining better maps and tools to navigate the complexities of world around us. The ways that open data is finding its way into the hands of citizens and consumers were described today in a new report from a federal interagency task force on “smart disclosure.”

Smart disclosure, for those unfamiliar, is a term of art for when a private company or government agency provides you with access to your own data in a format that enables you to put the data to use.

When distributed this way, personal data ownership improves market transparency, empowers consumers and drives the nascent open data economy.

According to federal officials, this report from the National Science and Technology Council is the “first comprehensive description of the Federal Government’s efforts to promote the smart disclosure of information that can help consumers make wise decisions in the marketplace.” If you’re interested in the topic, it’s one of the most clearly written government documents I’ve come across lately: give it a read.

As Alex Fitzpatrick pointed out in his post on the ways companies are using government data, however, the report didn’t include the names of specific companies.

Given my research on the open data economy, I think I can fill in a few more of them, looking across sectors. (The administration itself identified Billguard, OPower and iTriage in February, in a post on open government data and jobs.)

In education, check out startups like Better Lesson and SoFi.

In energy, look at WattzOn, PlotWatt, SimpleEnergy and FirstFuel, in addition to OPower.

In consumer finance, evaluate HelloWallet, Brightscope and CalcBench, in addition to Billguard.

In real estate, look to Zillow and Trulia.

In healthcare, consider mHealthCoach, Kyruus or the growing number of health care apps and services on display at next week’s “Health Datapalooza.”

The administration’s top IT officials — chief information officer Steven VanRoekel and chief technology officer Todd Park — say that open data is good for America. If its release supports or leads to the creation of more startups that create products and services that improve people’s lives, that assertion will be born out.

If you recognize other startups from the descriptions in Alex’s post, please drop him a comment or a tweet — and if you use open government data in your startup, nonprofit or enterprise, please let us know in the comments.

Putting personal open data in the hands of consumers targets transparency where it matters

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“…a few companies are challenging the norm of corporate data hoarding by actually sharing some information with the customers who generate it — and offering tools to put it to use,” writes Natasha Singer in the New York Times. “It’s a small but provocative trend in the United States, where only a handful of industries, like health care and credit, are required by federal law to provide people with access to their records.”

I’m a little perplexed by this story. It’s like the author goes out of her way to be skeptical of “open data” but then writes a piece that explored how data is being (wait for it) opened up to consumers.

On the one hand, Singer is 100% right: much of the data collected about consumers is not available to them, from shopping to telecom to energy to healthcare, much less data collected in the business of government. For them, an “open data society” is a long way off. On the other hand, I’m perplexed about where this society has been proposed or by whom. There’s a bit of a whiff of straw here.

All that being said, that Singer identified consumer data disclosure as a trend in the New York Times Sunday Business section is notable, given the influence of that perch.

Of course, if you’ve been reading Radar, you knew about smart disclosure and targeted transparency, knew personal data ownership was a trend to watch, and learned more about the acceleration of consumer data releases this February.

If you missed those pieces, I hope they’re useful to you today.

Personal data ownership is an idea that numerous people have been advancing and advocating for years. (I was glad to see Doc Searls cited in the Times). It’s an important principle.

The idea of a “right to data” has also received high-level support (if not legislation and regulation): last year, former Federal Trade Commission chairman Leibowitz said that American citizens should be able to learn see what information is held by them and “have the right to correct inaccurate data,” much as they do with credit reports.

While there’s still a long way to go before a majority of the private sector acknowledges such access as an a privilege, there’s good reason to see a shift that will benefit consumers in the long-run.

Over time, it’s even possible that such open data will benefit society. (Just don’t go overboard on the hoopla about it.)

Will Mayor-Elect Eric Garcetti reboot Los Angeles government for the 21st century?

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eric-garcettiYesterday, Los Angeles city councilman Eric Garcetti won the Los Angeles mayor’s race.

Garcetti, at 42, is the youngest LA mayor in half a century and will be the city’s first Jewish mayor. LA’s new mayor is also a former Rhodes scholar, a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild, Naval Reservist and supporter of modernizing technology in city government.

Garcetti’s history on that last count had some observers wondering whether Los Angeles’ next mayor would ‘go geek’. He told “Neon Tommy,” a digital publication from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg program, that “he would make data a priority by creating a new position for it and appointing a ‘true’ chief technology officer.”

As a city councilman, Garcetti called for LA city data to be opened up to its people and authored a motion that will go before the council this spring.

“I look forward this fall to seeing the city opening the doors to data sharing, citizen participation, hackathons, and other ways we can build a truly 21st-century government,” said Garcetti at a campaign event prior to his election, according to Neon Tommy.

How fluent is LA’s new mayor on the language of technology and digital governance?

You can judge for yourself in the video embedded below, filmed during July 2012 at the Silicon Beach Fest.

Under this new mayor, will the second-most populous city in the United States take substantive steps to improve civic services and accountability?

While there’s reason to be hopeful, any new initiatives will have to be balanced against the city’s growing budget deficit and calibrated to a highly mobile, multi-lingual population.

As Paresh Dave explored in his feature, other cities are experimenting with open data, mobile applications and citizen engagement to varied effect.

Garcetti’s administration would benefit from taking pages from the technology playbooks of other cities, in particular Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York and Portland. Angelenos will need him to learn (quickly) from the mistakes of other cities and expand upon their success.

Tying the issues that Garcetti ran on to the goals the new administration will set priorities for legislation, policy and initiatives.

Given the considerable economic and cultural diversity of the City of Angels, his administration will need to support fundamental democratic principles in any new initiatives, from a participation divide to plain language in multiple languages to disparities in broadband Internet. LA will need a better digital divide strategy, perhaps centered upon libraries, schools and community centers, to ensure that more equitable civic participation in open government efforts around policies, regulations or proposed council orders.

His campaign promises on technology reflect some of those priorities and an appreciation of the challenges. Implementation will, as always, be another matter.

Open government experts raise concerns about “mosaic effect” in open data policy

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“…one of the things we’re doing to fuel … more private sector innovation and discovery,” said President Barack Obama is to make the vast amounts of America’s data open and easy to access for the first time in history.”

That aspirational goal is one that countries around the world have taken on as their own over the past four years. Globally, officials are increasingly viewing open data as fundamental to democratic governance and development. That growth has naturally promoted new scrutiny and questions about what open data is and who benefits from its release.

“This comes at a time when there are significant doubts around the world about outcomes and best practices,” said John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, in an interview. “The White House’s new policies make clear that we don’t have all the answers, but there are ways forward, towards new data and better processes.”

Last week, Slate published my article exploring why a new executive order to open up federal government data is a big deal.

The article generally presents the new executive order and associated open data policy in a generally positive light, with one significant caveat: its effect upon or relevance to government transparency.

The focus that the President and his advisors have taken on “open data” is squarely upon entrepreneurship, innovation, and scientific discovery, not “transparency,” an issue his administration has faced substantial — and growing — criticism over after a promising start to his first term.

“Creating transparency and accountability through new technology won’t be achieved through a single policy, or just through cultural change or political commitments,” said Wonderlich. “What was so reassuring about this announcement is that the White House is still working on all of those areas. There are certainly some still missing, or some areas where the White House is less accountable, or more secretive (money in politics and national security still come to mind immediately) but this demonstrates that “open data,” if that phrase is to have lasting meaning, will evolve through a complex policy process.”

Steven Aftergood, however, questioned whether making government data open and machine-readable would have an effect on government secrecy, particularly in the intelligence world. Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, has been a long-time observer and critic of the culture and machinery of secrecy in the federal government.

A second caveat, which wasn’t in my Slate article, comes with respect to the inclusion of a warning about the so-called “mosaic effect” in the open data policy.

This effect, which originates in the intelligence world, describes a situation in which multiple pieces of data and information that are meaningless (or at least harmless or unclassified) on their own could be combined and analyzed to discover the identities of people, sensitive locations or other secrets.

That official consideration left journalists and open government advocates worried.

OpenTheGovernment.org praised aspects of the open data policy but expressed concern about potential exemptions from disclosure because of the mosaic effect. Scholars and journalists have long been concerned that the mosaic theory has been used to deny Freedom of Information Act requests.

While architects of Data.gov and former US CIO Vivek Kundra have acknowledged concerns about the mosaic effect in the past, formal articulation in the policy is a new wrinkle.

In answer to my question about this precise concern at a press conference at the FOSE Conference in Washington last week, US CIO Steven VanRoekel said that nothing in the executive order or in the open data policy would allow the federal government to restrict the release of information requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

Federal agencies will “still follow FOIA to the letter,” said VanRoekel. “Nothing about executive orders and policy changes law.”

Whether or not this new policy is used to restrict sensitive information will be seen in the months and years ahead. In the meantime, concern is probably better focused upon the dangerous parallel the Department of Justice is making between espionage and investigative journalism.

New York City moves to apply predictive data analytics to preventing fires

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“The total embedding of analytics in New York City has just really passed the tipping point,” related Michael Flowers, in an email last week. Flowers, the Big Apple’s first “chief analytics officer, discussed how predictive data analytics were saving lives and taxpayer dollars with me last year. In the months since, he has continued to apply data science to regulatory data in the public sector. The work of “Mayor Bloomberg’s Geek Squad” finally drew major media notice in March, when the New York Times featured their accomplishments.

Last week, New York City went further into its data-driven future when it announced plans to reduce deaths from fires by applying new risk-based fire inspection system. Essentially, NYC is applying the same predictive data analytics to assess and prioritize the buildings that firefighters inspect every year.

“Uniformed firefighters currently perform 50,000 full-building fire safety inspections every year and until now, fire officers had very limited information about how to prioritize buildings for inspection in the districts they protect,” said Mayor Bloomberg, in a statement. “Our new system changes that. Drawing on building information from many sources, the Risk Based Inspection System enables fire companies to prioritize the buildings that pose the greatest fire risk—and that means we’ll stop more fires before they can start.”

Instead of cyclical inspections, the new NYC Fire Department system “tracks, scores, prioritizes, and then automatically schedules a building for inspection.”

While this kind of algorithmic regulation may send off warning bells in some observers, the use of such technology to score risk and, crucially, send trained human beings to investigate.

Flowers pointed out other areas where this kind of complementary action matter.

“To me, the Hurricane Sandy Administration Action Plan released [last week] is the most powerful expression of what’s happened here in the last 18 months or so,” he said. “We essentially served as the primary intelligence center for Sandy response and recovery. It speaks to things we are doing internally or externally with regards to data leveraging, synthesis, analysis and sharing to get to the most critical need the fastest. It shows how quickly we’ve rooted the concept into how the city does business.”

New Yorkers should expect more of this approach to governance in the future — and to gain more insight as the city’s developers and media analyze datasets released to the public.

“Up next is to roll out of the platform to the rest of the city, pushing all this data dynamically to the open data portal,” related Flowers, “which itself is being redone to reflect curated data, a development portal, and risk-based resource allocation over the Departments of Buildings, Fire, Finance, Housing and a few others.”

In the video below, recorded at the Strata Conference in NYC last year, Flowers talks more about his work.

Russia withdraws from Open Government Partnership. Too much transparency? [UPDATED]

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russia-OGP

“Inevitably, there will be questions about what we are each prepared to sign up to,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron in January, in his letter to his fellow G8 leaders. For months later, Russia has made clear it clear what it wasn’t willing to sign onto: the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The most recent update on Russia is that the Kremlin will be pursuing “open government” on its own terms. Russia has withdrawn the letter of intent that it submitted on April 2012 in Brazil, at the first annual meeting of the Open Government Partnership.

Update: On May 23, The Moscow Times reported that Russia had just “postponed” its entry into OGP. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian daily newspaper Kommersant that “we are not talking about winding up plans to join, but corrections in timing and the scale of participation are possible.” Open government advocate  David Eaves interprets this state of affairs to mean A) “transparency matters” and B) that “Russia may still be in OGP. Just not soon. And maybe never.” For now, Russia has withdrawn its letter of intent to join the Open Government Partnership and with that action, its commitments to transparency. OGP itself has  “adjusted” its website to reflect the change, which is to say that the former page for Russia can no longer be found. So what will open government mean in the largest country in the world? Read on.

If the dominant binary of the 21st century is between open and closed, Russia looks more interested in opting towards more controllable, technocratic options that involve discretionary data releases instead of an independent judiciary or freedom of assembly or the press.

One of the challenges of the Open Government Partnership has always been the criteria that a country had to pass to join and then continue to be a member. Russia’s inclusion in OGP instantly raised eyebrows, doubts and fears last April, given rampant corruption in the public sector and Russia’s terrible record on press freedom.

“Russia’s withdrawal from the OGP is an important reminder that open government isn’t easy or politically simple,” said Nathaniel Heller, executive director of Global Integrity. “While we don’t yet fully understand why Russia is leaving OGP, it’s safe to assume that the powers that be in the Kremlin decided that it was untenable to give reformers elsewhere in the Russian government the freedom to advance the open government agenda within the bureaucracy.”

The choices of Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev, who had publicly supported joining the OGP and made open government a principle of his government, may well have been called into question by Russia’s powerful president, Vladimir Putin.

Medvedev had been signaling a move towards adopting more comfortable sorts of “openness” for some time, leading up to and following Russia joining the Open Government Partnership in December 2012. Russia’s prime minister has sought to position himself as a reformer on the world stage, making a pitch at Davis for Russia being “open for business” earlier this year at the Davos economic forum. Adopting substantive open government reforms could well make a difference with respect to foreign investors concerns about corruption and governance.

While the Kremlin shows few signs of loosening its iron grip on national security and defense secrets, Russia faces the same need to modernize to meet the increasing demand of its citizens for online services as every developed nation.

Even if Russia may not be continue its membership in the Open Government Partnership, the Russian government’s version of “openness” may endure, at least with respect to federal, city and state IT systems. Over the winter, a version of “Open Government a la Russe” – in Cyrillic, большоеправительство or “big government” — seemed to accelerating at the national level and catching on in its capital. Maybe that will still happen, and Russion national action plan will go forward.

“While Russia’s approach to open government may be primarily technocratic, there’s a sense in which even the strongest legal requirements are only tools we give to our allies in governments,” said John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunight Foundation. “FOI officers analyzing records, or judges deciding whether or not to enforce laws are embodying both legal and cultural realities when they determine how open a country will be, just as much as policy makers who determine which policies to pass. While Russia’s initial commitment to OGP was likely a surprising boon for internal champions for reform, its withdrawal will also serve as a demonstration of the difficulty of making a political commitment to openness there.”

What is more clear, however, is that the Kremlin seems much more interested the sort of “open government” that creates economic value, as opposed to sustaining independent auditors, press or civil society that’s required in functional democracies. Plutocracy and kleptrocacy doesn’t typically co-exist well open, democratic governments — or vice versa.

Given that the United States efforts on open government prominently feature the pursuit of similar value in releasing government data, Russia’s focus isn’t novel. In fact, “open data” is part of more than half of the plans of the participating countries in OGP, along with e-government reforms. In May of 2012, a presidential declaration directed governmental bodies to open up government data.

In February, Moscow launched an open data platform, at data.mos.ru, that supplied material for digital atlas of the city. Russia established an “open data council” the same month. Those steps forward could stand to benefit Russian citizens and bring some tangential benefits to transparency and accountability, if Russia and its cities can stomach the release of embarrassing data about spending, budgets or performance.

While some accounts of open government in Russia highlighted the potential of Russia to tap into new opportunities for innovation afforded by connected citizenry that exist around the world, crackdowns on civil society and transparency organizations have sorely tested the Russian government’s credibility on the issue. This trial of anti-corruption blogger Alexey Navalny for corruption this spring showed how far Russia has to go.

“Open government isn’t just open data nor is it e-government, two areas in which the Russian Federal had appeared to be willing to engage on the open government agenda,” said Heller. “Many observers doubted how far Russia could take open government in a climate of political repression, civil society crackdowns, and judicial abuse of power.”

Today’s news looks like a victory of conservatives in the Kremlin over government reformers interested in reducing corruption and adopting modern public sector management techniques. “We need to use modern technologies, crowd sourcing,” said Medvedev said in January 2013. “Those technologies change the status and enhance the legitimacy of decisions made in government.”

Changes in technology will undoubtedly influence Russia, as they will every country, albeit within the cultural and economic context of each. This withdrawal from OGP, however, may be a missed opportunity for civil society, at least with respect to losing a lever for reform, reduced corruption and institutions accountable to the people. Leaving the partnership suggests that Russia may be a bit scared of real transparency, or least the sort where the national government willing allows itself to be criticized by civil society and foreign non-governmental organizations.

It’s something of a mixed victory for the Open Government Partnership, too: getting to be a member and stay one means something, after all.

“For the Open Government Partnership, this will be seen as a bit of a blow to their progress, but its success was never predicated on getting every qualifying government to join,” said Wonderlich. “In a sense, Russia’s withdrawal may alleviate the need for OGP to grapple with Russia’s recent, severe treatment of NGOs there. More broadly, Russia’s withdrawal may better define the space in which the OGP mechanism can function well. Building a movement around commitments from heads of state has allowed OGP’s ranks to rapidly grow, but we’re also probably entering a new time for OGP, where the depth and reliability of those commitments will become clearer. Transitions between governments, domestic politics, corruption scandals, hypocritical behavior, uncooperative legislatures, exclusion of domestic NGOs, and internal power struggles may all threaten individual national commitments, and OGP will need to determine how to adapt to each of these challenges. OGP will need to determine whether it wants to be the arbiter of appropriate behavior on each of these dimensions, or whether its role is better left to the commitments and National Action Plans on which it was founded. ”

If OGP is to endure and have a meaningful impact on the world, its imprimatur has to have integrity and some weight of moral justice, based upon internationally shared norms on human rights and civil liberties. As press freedom goes, so to does open government and democracy.

“International boosters of open government may want to remain cautious at embracing open government reformers at the first whiff of ‘openness’ or rhetorical commitment to the agenda,” said Heller. “Within weeks of Russia first making noise around joining OGP, the World Bank and others rushed to assemble a major international conference in the country around open government to boost reformers inside the bureaucracy as they sought to move the country into OGP. While no one should criticize those efforts, they are a sobering reminder that initial rhetorical commitment to open government can only take us so far, and it’s wise to keep the political powder dry for other downstream fights.”

Given the scale of bribery and the impact of corruption on growth, Russians can only hope that more “openness” with teeth comes to their country soon.

Fung outlines principles for democratic transparency and open government

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Archon Fung has published a new paper” [PDF] on open government, information and democracy. The abstract includes a useful breakdown of the components of democratic transparency:

In Infotopia, citizens enjoy a wide range of information about the organizations
upon which they rely for the satisfaction of their vital interests. The provision of
that information is governed by principles of democratic transparency. Democratic
transparency both extends and critiques current enthusiasms about transparency. It
urges us to conceptualize information politically, as a resource to turn the behavior of
large organizations in socially beneficial ways. Transparency efforts have targets, and we
should think of those targets as large organizations: public and civic, but especially private
and corporate. Democratic transparency consists of four principles. First, information
about the operations and actions of large organizations that affect citizens’ interests
should be rich, deep, and readily available to the public. Second, the amount of available
information should be proportionate to the extent to which those organizations
jeopardize citizens’ interests. Third, information should be organized and provided in
ways that are accessible to individuals and groups that use that information. Finally, the
social, political, and economic structures of society should be organized in ways that
allow individuals and groups to take action based on Infotopia’s public disclosures.

Fung’s paper focuses on focus upon “information about the activities of
large organizations—especially corporations and governments—rather than individuals” and “the important, defensive, face of the informational problem: information that people need to protect themselves against the actions of large organizations and to navigate the terrain created by such organizations,” as opposed to the myriad positive uses of open government data.

That time President Obama said “open data”

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On Wednesday, President Obama issued an historic executive order making open data the new default for releasing information in the federal government.

President Barack Obama watches as Todd Park, Assistant to the President and Chief Technology Officer, shows him information on a tablet during a meeting in the Oval Office, April 15, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The president announced the order on a trip to Austin, Texas, where he delivered the following remarks on open data at Applied Materials Inc.:
…

And one of the things we’re doing to fuel more inventiveness like this, to fuel more private sector innovation and discovery, is to make the vast amounts of America’s data open and easy to access for the first time in history.  So talented entrepreneurs are doing some pretty amazing things with data that’s already being collected by government.

So over at the Capital Factory, I met with folks behind the start-up called StormPulse, which uses government data on weather to help businesses anticipate disruptions in service.  And then you’ve got a Virginia company called OPower that’s used government data on trends in energy use to save its customers $200 million on their energy bills.  There’s an app called iTriage, founded by a pair of ER doctors that uses data from the Department of Health and Human Services to help users understand medical symptoms and find local doctors and health care providers.

And today I’m announcing that we’re making even more government data available, and we’re making it easier for people to find and to use.  And that’s going to help launch more start-ups.  It’s going to help launch more businesses.  Some of them undoubtedly will be using this data powered by chips that essentially started right here at Applied Materials.

It’s going to help more entrepreneurs come up with products and services that we haven’t even imagined yet.

This kind of innovation and ingenuity has the potential to transform the way we do almost everything.  One-third of jobs in Austin are now supported by the tech sector.  And we should do all we can to encourage this kind of innovation economy all across America, in ways that produce new jobs and new opportunities for the middle class.