Why the “Open Data Movement” is a Joke | Whimsley

Am I being unfair? Who, after all, is the Open Data Move­ment? Well it turns out there isn’t one really, at least when it comes to “open data” in the sense of “open gov­ern­ment data”, which along with “open sci­en­tific data” is one of the two most com­mon uses of the term.

“Open Data Move­ment” is a phrase dragged out by media-oriented per­son­al­i­ties to cloak a private-sector ini­tia­tive in the man­tle of pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics. Along with other cyber­cul­ture terms (“hack­tivism”, “uncon­fer­ences”, “hackathons”) the word “move­ment” sug­gests a coun­ter­cul­tural grass-roots ini­tia­tive for social change, but there isn’t any­thing of the sort that I can see.

Take Tim O’Reilly, who has thrown the phrase around for some time (see here for an exam­ple from a cou­ple of years ago). Like oth­ers who use the phrase, he sees no con­flict between civic cul­ture and cor­po­rate inter­ests, so the Strata con­fer­ences and Open Gov­ern­ment con­fer­ences he has run have been spon­sored by major soft­ware, hard­ware, and com­puter ser­vices com­pa­nies (includ­ing, I think, my employer, for whom I do not speak). Strata 2012, for exam­ple, is co-hosted by Cloud­era, spon­sored by EMC and MapR, and many oth­ers.

Or take the “Code for Amer­ica” ini­tia­tive, which uses lan­guage that is explic­itly about pro­mot­ing an alter­na­tive vision of how gov­ern­ment works (“it’s about cit­i­zen­ship and how the inter­net is fun­da­men­tally reshap­ing the way gov­ern­ment can work”, It’s “a Peace Corp for geeks”) and which has many well-intentioned peo­ple involved. Yet when it comes to it, there’s a lot more here about mak­ing uncon­tro­ver­sial data avail­able (includ­ing for com­mer­cial use) than there is about any­thing like chal­leng­ing gov­ern­ment on actual account­abil­ity or trans­parency. So it’s no sur­prise that the list of donors includes major cor­po­ra­tions like EMC (again), ESRI, Google, O’Reilly Media, and Microsoft.

It’s not that there’s nec­es­sar­ily any­thing wrong with Code for Amer­ica, more that it’s not a move­ment in any polit­i­cal or even cul­tural sense. Another mem­ber of the CfA donor list is the Omid­yar Net­work, set up by the eBay bil­lion­aire Pierre Omid­yar, and it reflects his view that pri­vate sec­tor cor­po­rate profit-making activ­ity and civic activ­ity are not in ten­sion, but com­ple­ment each other.

As a result, the actual activ­i­ties of this “move­ment” end up being to push for gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies of private-sector activ­ity. It’s “big soci­ety” all over again. This is the TED world­view, so it’s no sur­prise that the recent Open Gov­ern­ment Part­ner­ship wraps itself in noble goals such as fight­ing “cor­rup­tion, closed doors, the con­sol­i­da­tion of power” (see Hillary Rod­ham Clinton’s remarks) and basks in the reflected virtue of TED fel­low Walid Al-Saqaf (Open data vital for a new Yemen) when the most likely out­comes are pri­vati­sa­tion ini­tia­tives of the kind pro­moted by Fran­cis Maude.