This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 07 Jul 2012, by Todd Suomela.
It is not uncommon to hear open data advocates promise that newly-released information will allow government to make better decisions. It’s a dream embodied by sites like healthdata.gov and the EPA’s Apps for the Environment contest. And in one sense, it’s a perfectly coherent vision: information can lead to better decisions; so can opening deliberative processes to include more qualified participants. If you have any faith at all in democracy and rational deliberation, these ideas are inescapable.
But these ideas can also be easily overextended into the assumption that governance has computable solutions—that politics lingers not because, even after decades of thoughtful analysis, groups have competing claims that must be resolved; but rather because post-partisan technocracy is only now becoming able to offer definitive answers. This is the same wishful thinking that motivates efforts like We The People, MADISON, Americans Elect, and optimism about the net bloc’s ability to translate its successful activism against SOPA/PIPA to other issues.
This tendency to deny of the inescapability of politics is a relatively quiet current in the open data movement, but it is a real one. And while I doubt that open data as a cause will live or die by the success of its commercial ambitions, the implicit promise that open data can rescue policy from politics seems destined to end in disappointment. We can smooth the flow of information through our institutions, but this alone will rarely be enough to redeem them, much less render them obsolete.
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