Panel: Open Data --> Open Gov't - The government should open source everything! Hosted by SilverStripe

@camfindlay1, @benbalter, Bene, Laura, and Pete are looking forward to your questions!

Looking forward to your questions everyone :)

Hi there, I'm interested in making election campaign contributions more transparent, so that journalists and the public can easily see who is giving money to politicians and how that's affecting their decisions.

I'm at the early stage of exploring this area and am keen to know of places I should look and people I should talk to. Thanks = )

Interesting @andrebate - I think there is policy around disclosure of such things via the electoral commission site (including some spreadsheet data files). Is there a way you can frame the above as more of a panel type question?

Or we can play the "5 whys" game... @andrebate why is it important to see how decisions are affected (potentially) by campaign funding?

Can I invite Laura to this group? Or can only admins do that?

@marianneelliott I believe the group can be joined by anyone - does Laura have a Loomio account? :)

Hi there, on this panel I'm interested to know what savings in government expenditure you each envision might result if the government were to open source everything. What financial and empirical arguments can we make for the above motion? Thanks.

Thanks @camfindlay1 - A few thoughts:

• Was asking the question since I’m wanting to develop some kind of website across a few countries showing where politicians get their funding from. I’m aware of NZ Herald’s recent crowd sourcing project to make the Electoral Commission’s info more easily accessible. Not sure if this is a panel question, but rather seeing if anyone can point me in the right direction with what’s happening in this space.

• The why: Politicians are more likely to serve special interests where they’re getting campaign funding from special interests, and where its hard for the public to see who’s funding them. Here’s an attempt at further exploring the why. Politicans sometimes put in place policies that serve those who fund them, at the expense of the broader public. Why: 1) because extra electoral funding helps them win elections. 2) Because if its hard for people to see that money’s influencing their decisions there’s little political downside. Drilling down on on point 2, making financing more transparent increases the political risk of losing votes from the public for a policy that helps special interests and not the public. There are a few things that could help, including more public financing of elections, spending caps, lowering the cap for donations to be disclosed, the public caring more about policies which serve special, rather than public interests.

Thanks

This is an open public group, anyone can join

I have a couple of questions:

1. A powerful theme in government is contestability. In the political arena and in public forums, this often deteriorates into adversarial and even just needlessly bad behaviour, for example in parliament. Can open-sourcing create a meta-conversation that calls out the bad stuff and promotes more productive behaviours of tolerance and respect?
2. Public participation in policy-setting and political decision-making relies on the mechanism of submissions made by individuals and groups without knowledge of one another. These are easily picked off and dismissed one by one by decision-making committees and other bodies. Can open-sourcing build collaborative submission-crafting and therefore tilt the power balance back towards citizens?

@theodoretaptiklis I remember reading some of @benbalter 's work on public policy consultation and participation via GitHub. I imagine he'll be able to chime in on these points :)

@andrebate I'm going to play my 2nd "why" on your points above... Why do you think parties (or the people within them) believe that making financing more transparent increases the political risk of losing votes? (I'm trying to drill down to a core question we can play with on the panel ;) )

I'm interested in the roles that independent statutory agencies charged with oversight play allied to NGO projects like the Project On Government Oversight http://www.pogo.org in the US and difficulties in sourcing official information regardless of the enabling legislation to make that happen (OIA, FOI...)

A leading question: Shouldn't sites like https://www.fyi.org.nz have been an initiative sustained as part of a public service (government) responsibility?

I'm interested in hearing what the panelists think are the biggest barriers to the NZ govt taking an open by default approach to code. Also what international governments should we be looking to as examples of best practice? How have they overcome these barriers?

Thanks @camfindlay1 My thought on your second "why" question is that parties would see a risk of losing votes if the public don't vote for them after seeing politicians/parties serving special interests rather than general interests (especially after being influenced by funding from special interests). If a sufficient number of voters don't learn about what's happening and care, then making data more transparent wouldn't help. One other thought is that open data could help a healthy public service to be more effective, even if the public don't care. So I guess that a thing for the panel to discuss could be how you can get the public to engage with open data enough that it'd influence decision makers.

@andrebate yes! that is a good question.

Excellent questions regarding use of Open processes and platforms to engender a more accountable and transparent public service, very keen to hear the ideas in these areas.

While there is talk of both opening data between government departments to improve efficiency, and opening government data to the public for the myriad reasons listed here, I'm very excited about the intersection of these two concepts. In particular I'm interested in what could be enabled by linking the enormous, rich datasets of government, and already open data, with spatial data.

What could giving access to interrelated ministry's data attached to spatial data do for public, private and institutional research? Sure, the headaches of managing privacy to create such a system are significant, but the potential is quite incredible.

Another line of questioning that burns my brain in this area is how the potential for open gov data could re-conceptualise privacy and responsibility.

Currently we keep the vast majority of gov data private for the sake of protecting the individual. E.g. in the case of education data we keep truancy data private in order to protect the child or family, however if we accept that the concept that the concept of The Family as being the most important social unit to be fundamentally problematic in terms of fostering the greatest benefit to the individual, family, community and society, then perhaps we can look at how giving access to such data to the community within which that child lives we can enable a shift towards community responsibility for the individual, as opposed to that responsibility being solely on the family. If it takes a village to raise a child, then how can open gov data enable the creation of better villages and better villagers?

on embracing our storytellers (Laura O'Connell). we need people to interpret complex language to share the data on policy making. making it accessible, simple and compelling. (indeed it is a case of relating to all sorts of humans)

Q to Pete Herlihy; maybe Open means to change the way government data is CLASSIFIED? What is the classification system based on ? if it is interconnected with a capitalistic mentality, this needs to shift. There was mention of concerns of Damaging info, which must include financial survival and protecting private data, but this is part of the fear which must change first. Is there info on who, why and how often the classification system is monitored?

@mayameyer - I'm really starting to appreciate the value of stories & their teller of late, and the vital function they play in 'selling' the message - something that has been lacking in FLOSS for a very long time

what is FLOSS? @jacovandermerwe

"Free, Libre Open Source Software".
I am bias to the term "Libre", rather than "Free", as I'm multilingual & "Free" primarily implies "Gratis" ($0, no value) rather that "Freedom" (aka "Liberty").
It's more intuitive to convey concepts supporting Liberty & Freedon, rather than saying "'Free Software'. Oh, no, I didn't mean freeware or shareware", etc.
1st impressions