By Toby McIntosh
The freedom of information and open government data (OGD) communities “could benefit from closer collaboration,” according to new report written by Silvana Fumega for the World Wide Web Foundation.
Fumega elaborated on her conclusions in an e-mail interview with FreedomInfo.org. Besides discussing the two communities’ similarities and difference, Fumega compares the evaluation systems used for both areas. Fumega is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania.
Fumega’s report pushes the interaction concept, saying:
Despite efforts made over the last decade, we have really only begun to see the full potential of both Freedom of Information and Open Government Data. Far more will be achieved, and with far greater efficiency, if both FOI and OGD communities invest in a shared research and advocacy agenda.
The FOI/OGD connection is a key element in a new report that tells how the Web Foundation’s Open Data Lab Jakarta teamed up with local groups to encourage the government to release data about the education sector. “This approach, which we call “responsive data”, differs both from the purely demand-based models of FOI and from some of the heavily supply-driven models of open data,” the report states.
A Web Foundation researcher, Michael Canares, told FreedomInfo.org that “we’ve flagged the relationship between FOI and Open Data as an important area for further research in the closing section of the paper.”
Regarding the Indonesia case study, he commented, “At present, I don’t think we can say that there is a direct relationship between the existence of a FOIA and the disclosure of open data, but an existing culture of openness of course helps organisations like ours to encourage governments to share data.” He and Satyarupa Shekhar wrot a 2015 paper on open data and sub-national governments.
The suggestion of more interaction between the FOI and OGD communities, while scarcely new, seems appear and reappear with limited follow-through. It was discussed several months ago as part of an extended online exchange about the interrelationship of FOI, privacy and open data. (See collected comments on Freedominfo.org.)
Interview with Fumega
The following is the text of FreedomInfo.org questions and Fumega responses.
Q: You suggest that “the most likely area of collaboration between FOI and OGD communities will come in the issue of gaining access to datasets that governments do not wish to proactively publish, for reasons of political sensitivity mostly.” You elaborated by saying: “It is here that the decades of experience built up by the FOI community can assist the OGD community. This collaboration can be foster by creating a physical and intellectual space for these FOI and OGD actors to come together to talk to each other (an space with people talking across each other could provide a better chance of an agreed approach to the disclosure of information and data).
OK, finally the Q: Why do you think this has not happened? You point out in your report that the OGD community has collaborated with government to get data and is focused on reuse. But there is a lot of undisclosed data. The second edition of the Open Data Barometer said that over 90 percent of the countries surveyed do not publish key datasets in open formats. (See previous article in FreedomInfo.org) So wouldn’t it seem natural that the OGD movement would make more use of FOIA?
A: There are multiple answers to that question, however, one of the main explanations for the lack of collaboration between these two communities relates to the different approaches to the information and towards governments. A summary of these differences:
Q: Can you explain more about what you mean by “creating a physical and intellectual space for these FOI and OGD actors to come together to talk to each other”?
A: We all know that conferences and other sort of face-to-face events are key activities in both areas (FOI and OGD) to discuss the main issues as well as to build bridges between individual experts as well as organizations.
In that line, one of the main conclusions arising from the report is the need for a conference to discuss the shared research and advocacy agenda on several topics. Among the main points to be discussed in such event are: FOI; OGD; Government use of shared data; and Privacy (the last two topics are supporting issues for the previous two).
As the numbers of OGD and FOI initiatives have increased after the launch of the Open Government Partnership, its emphasis on collaboration, peer learning and assessment means that the Partnership could potentially provide a favourable vehicle to achieve a closer collaboration between these two fields. In this sense, an OGP event or a separate conference (not under the banner of one of the existing FOI or OGD conferences) could provide the scenario to discuss not only those above-mentioned topics but also to enhance collaboration between groups and also to allow new issues to be discovered and to be analysed.
Q: There are barriers to reuse of data because of copyright laws or format limitations. Have these been identified adequately as a precursor to action?
A: In the case of copyright and intellectual property rights, most FOI laws either did not touch on copyright and intellectual property rights (or did so only to protect the government agency disclosing the information from an action for breach of copyright. As laws on copyright were mostly left unamended, a requester who obtained information from government in response to an FOI request had only the rights to reuse that information that existed in that jurisdiction’s legislation on copyright (in countries that derived their law from the United Kingdom, this generally boiled down to ‘fair use’).
Conversely, in the OGD field, the granting of a licence to the user to reuse, republish the data, is inherent to the initiatives and has prompted reform of the legal regimes for copyright in government held information in many jurisdictions. Example of that is the new Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015 in the UK.
Thus, there is scope to explore collaboration on improvements to copyright and intellectual property legislation, so as to put a more solid foundation under existing policy moves towards open licensing for datasets. There seems little reason why the rights to re-use data should be greater than the right to re-use information obtained via FOI requests. Similarly, there is room for collaboration on the question of file formats. While the formats and mechanisms (such as APIs) needed by OGD practitioners may differ from those needed by people making FOI requests, the latter are still subject to risks of not being able to use disclosed information if it is provided in a proprietary file format that they do not have the software to open and read it with.
Q: When there are barriers, is it your impression that the ODG community is reluctant to take political action (regulatory or legislative) to remedy the problem?
A: As a generalisation — because no one model fits all — the FOI community has mainly focused on the construction, enactment and operation of access to information laws, while OGD groups are dedicated to the reuse of disclosed data. The former fundamentally comes from a legal rights background, while the latter has generally stemmed from economic/commercial or technological environments. These differences partially explain the diverse approaches to their relationship with governments and, therefore, the differences in terms of political action.
In spite of this, there are recent examples showing a changing approach of the OGD community. The concerns expressed in FOI circles to the proposed weakening of the UK FOI Act have had a clear correlation in the reaction of international organisations such as the Web Foundation, MySociety and OKFN. The international organisations working in open data-related activities are publicly getting involved in the advocacy process, to try and stop the British government’s latest efforts to weaken that country’s FOI law.
Q: You wrote, “If we were to oversimplify things, we might say that FOI advocates have been motivated by the concept of accountability, while OGD advocates have been driven by a belief in generating additional value through co-production.” Does this define the FOI community too narrowly? Aren’t many groups that support FOI laws dedicated to using them collaboratively for additional value? How does his relate to mutual appreciation?
A: As previously mentioned, this is an oversimplification of the groups working in both areas. However, it reflects the main trends in terms of the features of the actors in FOI and OGD fields. Thus, even though both groups work with government information resources, the FOI movement regards the government as something that needs to be watched and held accountable, while the OGD groups see governments as a source of useful data given the breadth and depth of government’s involvement in people’s lives and as an economic actor.
This classification relates to the main advocates’ professional backgrounds as well as their respective philosophical approaches (this does not mean that each movement presents a coherent monolithic body of thought but they share, in each particular phase of the movement, a set of concepts in which they based their activities and strategies).
Most FOI advocates have come from either from the freedom of expression or public law fields, and have used rights-based arguments to promote the enactment of FOI laws that are driven by a belief in the value of governments being publicly accountable for their actions (and inactions). The area has largely been a lawyers’ domain. This laid the foundations for a legalistic approach to the initiatives, and adversarial relationships with government, since FOI laws are fundamentally about testing the strength of competing claims to where the public interest lies, in disclosure or secrecy. In contrast, the OGD community tends to attract professionals with strong IT knowledge, or technocratic policy backgrounds. These OGD actors look for more cooperative relationships with governments. The difference partially resides in the fact that the latest groups of actors work with the data the governments are willing to disclose. Thus, the proactive disclosure of the data, in the case of OGD field, generates a different dynamic between civil society organizations and governments than the one shaped by the duty to answer to the requests for information (reactive transparency).
Q: More generally. If you were orchestrating the FOIA/OGD summit, what would you put on the agenda?
A: There is much fruitful research, assessment and analysis to be done of both OGD and FOI and (see question 2). Despite the need for further research to develop a framework to understand the use of information and data in a global comparative exercise, as mentioned in the report, there are also other points that need some effort in order to build bridges between the FOI and the OGD communities. Thus, to discuss how to have provisions on formats for disclosure of government held information and data, to have clear licenses for the use, to count with more politically sensitive information proactively disclosed, to solve accountability problems with new tools, to protect people’s right to privacy while enhancing transparency, they are all tasks, among many others, which require a closer collaboration from these groups as well as a further discussion and analysis.
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