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Ask Slashdot: Is Making Government More Open and Connected a Good Idea?
Nerval's Lobster writes "For quite some time, there's been a theory drifting around that government can be made more open and efficient via the same crowdsourcing and social-networking tools that created such successes out of Facebook, Twitter and Kickstarter. In that spirit, numerous pundits and analysts have advocated the development of 'e-government' or 'government 2.0.' But what if the idea isn't as great as it seems? That's the angle embraced by Evgeny Morozov in a recent essay for The Baffler. Structured as a lengthy takedown of open-source advocate and O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly, the piece veers off to fire a few torpedoes at the idea of making government more responsive and transparent through technology (the latter being something O'Reilly readily advocates). 'One of the main reasons why governments choose not to offload certain services to the private sector is not because they think they can do a better job at innovation or efficiency,' Morozov writes, 'but because other considerations — like fairness and equity of access — come into play.' If O'Reilly himself argues that a government should be 'stripped down to its core' into a form more transparent and collaboration-friendly, Morozov counters with the idea that the 'participation' envisioned by most government 2.0 scenarios is limited, little better in practice than the comments section at the bottom of a corporate blog posting."
if you want to know more about how the government is screwing you!
There are people who equate the two, and people who do not. The two camps will never agree. The problem with the first group is that they cannot allow the second to survive.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
When has the government ever done anything "fairly" or to ensure "ease of access"?
Politicians, after all, are the easiest people in the world to bribe, it is the only job in America where bribes are legal. The result is something that pervades every aspect of government at all levels called PAY TO PLAY.
This ensures that 1) The biggest briber gets the best deal 2) Everyone else gets screwed.
Worse, governments spout all kinds of emotional propaganda to cover up the actual reality of how the system works, directing people's anger away from the real criminals onto other groups in society. Then they promise "openness" and "transparency:" while doing the exact opposite. Millions of well intentioned good people are duped by this propaganda every single day.
Murphy was an optimist
The answer is "yes"
Title isn't leading at all, just your imagination.
Seriously though, this debate is a lot older than TFA implies.
According to Betteridge's Law of Headlines the answer is "no".
Going from "open government" to "outsourcing" is a non sequitur meant to set up a straw man. It is outsourcing that results in private firms treating government data as proprietary, and it is this kind of outsourcing that open government initiatives seek to avoid.
It's a long piece. Tl;dr: Think tank wonk mistakes Tim O'Reilly for a technolibertarian and turgidly tilts at windmills of his own invention.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Is Making Government More Closed and Disconnected a Good Idea?
In a well working democracy, the power of the numbers would trample those two in the ground.
Didn't someone campaign in 2008 on the idea of transparency and open government? Oh yeah, he was campaigning.
"but because other considerations — like bribes — come into play."
FTFY
Hideki!
And that's why we have a constitutional republic.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Half the content is whining about "open source" versus "free software". The author was barely in high school when all that went down. Everything else is "zomg he is just like Ayn Rand!!!11!!"
Tim O'Reilly must have ruined his life somehow.
Nothing is more pointless than people are arguing over undefined buzzwords on the internet.
Technically yes, but we have allowed it to deteriorate into a corporate aristocracy, and completely abdicated our legal authority to it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The more we invest, the worse it gets. If anything, let's automate some existing systems, like the VA, before wasting money on this.
Did you delete all the good with the old skin?
In space no-one can hear your vuvuzela.
>> Is Making Government More Open and Connected a Good Idea?
If it ever happens, let me know. The only truly "open government" I've ever seen has been a township board. Even there, major decisions were as likely as to have been made out at dinner on someone's farm as in an open debate chamber. On every other level, governments have been headed down the path of beefing up specialist/executive powers at the expense of public access or power.
It seems to me the original democracy as practiced by the ancient Greeks was essentially crowdsourcing. All the man would gather in the square and all could speak and put forward their ideas which would be voted up or down by the crowd. This is simply adding the "over the internet" to a very old idea.
and examine the concern over the frenzy of the mob and the need to temper it as a reason for not having immediate votes by every citizen directly.
I just finished 6 hours worth of recorded lectures on the Federalists versus the anti-Federalists and the debates leading up to the writing of the constitution. Interesting how the concerns of both sides are still in play centuries later in most of the red/blue disagreements.
Here's my solution: Require all politicians, or those running for office for two years before, to wear recorders that record all audio and vidoeo in their vacinity -- video where they are looking, and audio. All of it, 100% around the clock.
Fuck these secret backroom deals once and for all. You wanna "serve the people"? Get on your god damned knees.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
99.9% of people who work for government are robots with no useful opinion on anything.
In a few more words, maybe: Recall that the USoA government was ment to be inefficient as a safeguard. Take away that safeguard and you need other safeguards. Say, making very clear what it is and also what it is not to do. This, however, almost automatically will expand over time, just like taxes. For politicians are not statesmen, and they invariably lack the spine not to meddle.
The problem with this sort of proposal is that it tends to look at technology, which isn't strange since it's usually technologists that propose it, and less at process, at the humans and their interests.
Which is ironic (showing I'm not American[tm]) since we all know the entire government and everything around it is made up of lobbyists. There's even several fields of industry entirely dependent on whole rafts of TLAgencies, making them untouchable with the merest mention of "jobs". Even if what they do is entirely unnecessairy as well as horribly inefficient --just like the government-- and overpriced.
Asking for a smaller government is akin to asking to cut into its collection of TLAgencies something fierce, and also to cut on pork barrel spending. It's not unreasonable because at least half the TLAgencies are reduntant or plain unnecessairy, and the pork barreling is similarly mostly overhead and thus always a net cost. But the whole mess has gotten so big that a bit of transparency and some technology to enable trawling through the muck isn't going to make much leeway.
And that, that is the real problem.
I used to subscribe to the Baffler, but issues came out less and less often, then stopped completely. Now they're back. They're one of the few publications still publishing serious essays.
That said, this essay is more about Stallman vs. O'Reilly. That's a modestly interesting subject, but has little to do with government. But what if government were "more connected"? What would it look like?
Banks used to be very disconnected internally. You could have a checking account, a savings account, a credit card, and a mortgage, and the different departments of the bank didn't know about the other accounts. Today, banks consolidate your "total relationship with the bank" into one online portal, and all the accounts can interconnect.
Suppose government did that. Federal and state income taxes, property taxes, parking fines, traffic tickets, bridge tolls, child support, welfare, social security, and Medicare, all on one convenient monthly statement. That's almost a no-brainer with today's technology. Some countries do that now; Sweden, for one.
Then integrate employment - the employer side verifies that you're in the system, and takes care of taxes, immigration status, and medical insurance premiums. Less paperwork for everybody. For casual employment, a Square reader and a smartphone app handles the paperwork.
That's "connected government". Is that what you want?
Under the Obama whitehouse, open transparent government translates to a plethora of propaganda websites with no substantial information, and certainly nothing embarrassing.
open as in "we can see its processes" (transparency) is good. I have no idea why "open" = "reduced".
Or is open source = reduced source?
Open door = reduced door?
Isn't this whole article a bit of a strawman? When discussion open government people are - in my experience at least - more commonly referring to improved representation, accountability, and a role in policy making. This article (unless I've misunderstood) is instead arguing against open-as-in-free-enterprise. Which yes, I think is a pretty daft approach to governance.
What I would like to see (personal soapbox; feel free to skip) is an approach to voting that allows for delegation of particular 'voting powers' to different individuals (e.g. a local representative, a public figure) with the option to reserve the self-same to yourself - with the associated obligation to actually vote in a given debate. Debates would still be held, televised, videoconferenced, etc. and voting on legislation would happen as it does (although more likely remotely). Yet, we get finer control of our vote on issues of particular interest. While the disinterested can still nominate someone else to vote on their behalf.
Put that online, make it all web2.0 with voting records on issues/breakdown. There you have it: Open governance (* at least more open and immune to lobbying that it currently is).
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
More open government is probably a good thing, more efficient government is certainly not a good thing.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Then whatever.
"I do not think it means what you think it means..."
I actually read TFA (from the Baffler) earlier this week, and (shockingly) I think a lot of the other /. commenters did not. Is "open" government good? Everybody likes "open!" But the point is that the definition of "open" is, well, open to interpretation, and may not be the interpretation you like. Saying "yes" or "no" without qualification means you don't understand the point of the debate: the definition of "open."
In the context of the article, the author makes the case that "open" to O'Reilly means "the government opens its functionality for exploitation by industry," whether that means government databases, or the ability to provide services. But this serves the industry, not the people. Basically likening the government to say, FaceBook having an "open" API to give companies the "freedom" to interoperate with it. But that's openness and freedom for developers (industry) and not for users (citizens). And for the goal of efficiency, not morality. You, citizen, still don't get to know what's going on behind closed doors, or have more than a token influence on policy.
It's the free/libre debate applied to government. Is the purpose of "open government" to improve efficiency by having private companies "plug-in" to the government system to provide services, or to transfer power to the citizen to enable self-governance? The article argues it's the former.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Yet another funny one from 1980: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_(Yes_Minister)
I feel part of what is happening at the big picture level is that examples like Debian and Wikipedia and Linux and GNU are reminding us that people can govern themselves in various ways. Example:
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization
We are also seeing how people can improve things by participating in a "gift economy" related to those sorts of projects and others. Government making free stuff for everyone (like public domain code from NASA or your local government staffers) is a potential big win for society, where a relatively small investment can yield big dividends by avoiding using "artificial scarcity" as a business model for important software tools or data sets.
As Lawrence Lessig writes in Code 2.0, behavior can be shaped through norms, rules, prices, and architecture. Government bureaucracies can affect all of those, but so can individuals, civic groups, and businesses. Maybe the internet is letting some of the lines blur a bit more these days?
We're also seeing that exchanging emails and IMs and twitters can replace some of the movement of monetary currency to signal "demand".
The internet has also made a lot of alternatives, if not easier, than at least "discoverable":
"The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
"This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century."
A Knight News Challenge on Open Government is just ending ($5 million to be given out). My wife and I put together one of the 828 entries (did not make the final cut though):
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/
There are many other interesting suggestions there:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/applause-feedback/
The O'Reilly book on open government is online, and I put up a link to it as an "inspiration" part of that challenge:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/inspiration/o-reilly-releases-open-government-book-for-free/
Anyway, as you imply, we have yet to see how all these visions of "open government" play out.
An indirectly related book:
http://www.amazon.com/Policy-Paradox-Political-Decision-Making/dp/0393976254
"Unlike most texts, which treat policy analysis and policy making as different enterprises, Policy Paradox demonstrates that "you can't take politics out of analysis." Through a uniquely rich
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Technically yes, but we have allowed it to deteriorate into a corporate aristocracy, and completely abdicated our legal authority to it.
Hence the power of term limits and prison terms!
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
It quite simply boils down to whomever controls the information has the power. In my area there is a fight to get the public bus systems GPS logs. They can look over the information and play with the numbers until they are able to say things like our buses are on-time 98% of the time. But what is their definition of on time. If an independent investigator has access they might find that the buses are on time 2% of the time if you make the parameters more reasonable. If the real information in this situation gets out then managers would look bad and might have to actually do something.
But these sort of situations aren't all bad. It is possible somebody might model the transit system and find simple ways to optimize the entire thing with few and cheap changes.
Then there are the outright lies. Also in my area the government has been running a steady deficit of around $250 million per year. This year looks like an election year so suddenly they have tabled a budget with a $16 million dollar surplus. From what I can tell one of the line items must be an anticipated lottery win because there is no way that they have been able to spend money like the way they have been and hope to pull this magic out of thin air. Now if the public had the details of what went into this and past budgets line by line and item by item I suspect that their shenanigans would instantly be exposed. Personally my hope is that this lie is so obscene that the voters toss this particular batch of bums out.
But the three arguments that I hear from government people is that some data will stigmatize someone (crime stats that say what everybody already knows), that they can't have outsiders second guessing everything as nothing will happen, and the last is that if internal documents are exposed that nobody in government can be honest with their opinions. This all boils down to they don't want people using facts to counter their stupidity and they don't want embarrassing facts interfering with their keeping their jobs.
... by those of us who pay the government to function in our benefit, as the founders intended, by each government funder telling government on what they are going to spend the funding each provided, on.
This means there is no more a budgeting problem as we funders decide where the funding is going to be used. No different than the owner and paycheck signer of a company tells its employees what to do.
Transparency comes from the government seeking funding for specific issues they want funding for. If the funders don't know about it, teh government doesn't get the funding.
Of course the funders must fund that which generates benefits we all can share in, not just to the benefit of the government.
We funders have the right and duty to do this as identified in the Declaration of Independence.
The funders are of course the Taxpayers. where voting is to help decide who is best qualified to implement the directions of the funders. And voters also help to decide where funding trusted to the government to decide (taxpayers who do not want to define all or part of their fundings use) is to be used.
This country was founded to be a Republic. FDR changed that into a Democracy of which the founders were against. Obama plans to do the same as FDR by taking advantage of bad economic situation (forced - make teh sequester as bad as possible?) and he like FDR will take credit and advantage of the recovery (though it was the oil industry for FDR and Obama it will be the exporting of Liquid Natural Gas to begin in 2015). Only Obama plans to convert this country to Socialism.
And this is why the article is against crowd sourcing and transparent government.
But in this Republic... The People are the Boss of government, not the other way around..