Yes! Many people confuse transparency and access to publicly funded
data, primarily because they understand that open government data are
simply those associated with the schedules of leaders, how leaders
spend money, how money is spent on programs or how leaders vote, etc.
The political process of government. These are all excellent
pursuits, and should be pursued in the name accuntability, evaluation,
transparency which are part of the democratic decision making
apparatus.
But that is not the only form of government decision making. Open
data from science, research, geomatics, NGOs and community developers
is something quite different. Open data for them means the non
private aggregated data at various scales such as the census, health
data, environmental data, location/place based data to enable citizen
science, participatory democracy or collaborative evidenced based
decision making. Another huge part of governing and the democratic
process.
This leads to citizen, NGO, business, academic led research on topics
such as population health, political economy, business analysis, crime
analysis etc. It can also mean the location of brown fields, oil
wells, mine sites etc. to do environmental and corporate
responsibility analysis that can be combined with census and
transparency spending analysis such as corporate welfare schemes or
parallel environmental impact assessments etc. Publicly funded
research data be they biological, physics, geological, oceanographic,
drug testing, or health research results, to enable citizens and NGO
led epidemiological studies, fish counts, water quality reporting,
climate modeling, indexes of well being, community mapping and so on.
This is a different kind of data access issue, not unrelated to
transparency but requiring a very different lens on the data part of
open data.
So, we would be better off being specific with what we want - access
to transparency data implies FOI requests, Stimulus Watch, Visible
Government, How'd they Vote, CivicAccess, or spending on research
while access to publicly funded data, implies Data Liberation
Initiative, CivicAccess, Municipal Data Liberation Initiative,
Research Data Canada, Geogratis, Geobase, etc.
Open data in essence does mean both, however, like all things the
devil is in the detail and how people interpret the terms and their
assumptions. Also, these two communities of access/open data
advocates do not necessarily overlap. And of course within these
there are many differences. In some cases open data also means open
publishing, open source, particularly in the sciences. Access to
publicly funded data and research data would include transparency data
while the transparency data advocates often forget that government and
corporate decision making is also conducted with research & public
data from both social and natural sciences.
It would be great to see these worlds collaborate, bridge and overlap
a bit more.
Newton<
[hidden email]> wrote:
--
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
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