Slashdot Mirror
British Gov't Releases Spending Data
An anonymous reader writes "In a move sure to have transparency activists salivating, the UK government has released some 195,000 lines of data detailing its financial outgoings. The BBC reports that 'All spending of more than £25,000 made between May and September was published — in line with a pre-election commitment by the Conservatives — although some departments also published spending over £500. People are being encouraged to pick through the enormous quantity of online information to spot waste and hold ministers to account.'"
I think that it should be the case for all country all the time, all department should have a drill down budget up the spending. Yes that would add an extra layer but you could remove all the "inspector" and "auditor" because if all data is online, the population and journalism will do that job. Also, many spending will be avoid because they will know it will be fully available online!
I know the slashdot crowd has this belief that openess and data are a good idea, but will that crowd be willing to change their mind if this turns out to be a bad idea ? What will happen with this flood of data ?
well, very few people will actually go thru it; those who do are highly motivated - either paid searchers, hired, by say the brit equivalent of the Koch brothers, or cranks, or whatever
What ever they find, most of it will be unkown unless published by the media
so , in the end, you don't have this utopian vision of the citizenry rising up to the task of rooting out fraud and abuse; you have people like the republicans who claimed Obama was spending 200 million dollars a day yelling loudly about their pet peeves...br? I predict this will be a bad thing all round
When Julian Assange first released Wikileaks he said that seeing what was being done with Wikipedia gave him the idea that if you just put the stuff out there then the crowds will mold and form it into something useful. He expected blogs and independent third parties to spring up out of the woodwork. So Wikileaks published the data and.... nothing.
Not even the newspapers picked up on the leaks because of the bystander effect. No news agency is willing to invest the resources and waits for someone else to do the hard work. Everything stalls and it falls into obscurity. The crowds just ignore it since there's this overwhelming heap of obscure data.
Having learnt through several iterations, Wikileaks now bids leaks to a news agency who gets a lock in period to go through all the data, pick out the juiciest stories and publish. After that Wikileaks releases the full data together with indicators and summaries of the data to direct the crowds.
Just dumping a huge mess of contextless data does nothing. You need contextual hints so people know where to start. You need experts to translate the internal jargon.
The danger to look out for is how regulations become gamed.
In this case, middle-level managers wanting to hide something will do so by outsourcing the work, rather than doing it 'in-house' in a public body.
Then the details can be labelled "commercially sensitive", and hidden from Freedom of Information requests.
Similar issues were seen in anti-drug operations in Cuba: once US forces started being shot at, the work was farmed out to MNCs - Multinational
Military Corporations, like Blackwater, typically staffed with ex- US special forces, operating from US bases. But the operations were commercial,
and any deaths secret. Unpopular operations became secret again, hidden from FOI requests.
For a political party that wants to see as much as possible privatised, this forces more work into the private sector, even when it could be done
easier and cheaper in the public sector. Beware of such tactics.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
Libertarians don't want transparent and accountable government. They want NO government.
There is no -1 Disagree.