Open & Shut — 2020 Vision
Hello again! As you may have noticed, Open & Shut has been on a bit of a hiatus for the last year or so. This blog was first created in 2017 as a space for open data advocates and practitioners to grapple with some challenging questions around the role of the open data movement in politically closed societies.
The open data movement burst into life in the early 2010s with the promise that, if governments cracked open their treasure troves of citizen data and made them publicly available, then non-government actors — be they community groups, non-profit organisations or private companies — could use them to bring about incredible economic, social and political benefits.
Since 2010 the movement has flourished, and has exerted significant influence on the practices of governments and international organisations. The publication of open government data has allowed for the development of a plethora of programmes that have contributed to the public good, whether through mapping and improving urban public transport systems, combating the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, or supporting accountable land ownership law in Rwanda. In a whole host of contexts, open data has been able to solve real, urgent problems for global citizens.
However, there is one major challenge at the core of a lot of the movement’s work, in that it is often heavily dependent on both the release of high-quality data by governments, and the existence of open political space in which civil society can request, receive, and create data, and publish data-driven work. Wherever open data practitioners are working to hold authorities to account, and to expose inefficiency, corruption and incompetence, then there are obvious incentives for governments to behave in uncooperative ways.
Data Advocacy In the Dark
We’re obviously not the first people to talk about the perils of undertaking open data-driven work in politically closed contexts. Tiago Peixoto described the challenge around implementing data-driven accountability initiatives in closed political environments in a 2013 article, where he argued that the two conditions for public officials’ accountability are publicity (namely, a free press that is capable of holding decision-makers to account) and political agency (that is, democratic mechanisms for citizens to fire and hire political decision-makers).
This throws up problems in a global context where press freedoms are in decline globally (according to Reporters Sans Frontières’ 2019 World Press Freedom Index), and where online public spaces are subject to ever-more state surveillance and control (as per Freedom House’s 2019 Freedom on the Net Report). It could be argued that the pathways for both publicity and political agency are, by and large, narrowing.
In states where the free press is effectively gagged, and where political leaders can act with little fear of being booted out by citizens’ democratic will, how can the open data movement deliver on any of its social or political promises?
This isn’t to dismiss the movement’s chances. The team behind Open & Shutwouldn’t have spent the last two and a half years working to develop the Iran Open Data portal if we were all open data pessimists. While Iran’s political mechanisms for democratic accountability are deeply flawed, to say the least, a vibrant and well-developed diaspora media ecosystem has an audience of tens of millions of Iranian citizens. Even in this tough context, spaces exist to share information with the public, and to expose corruption and inefficiency. In this sense, publicity isn’t so much of a problem.
But the problem remains that authoritarian governments’ institutions are fundamentally resistant to the idea of sharing and publishing open government data. Iran Open Data works hard to take the government data that is available, and to turn it into usable and useful material for journalists and civil society organisations. But in the face of the adversarial responses of state authorities, IOD will always struggle to provide the same breadth or depth of data as an official governmental open data portal.
Given that these limitations existence of such limitations, this blog exists to try and articulate some mitigations, and to explain how open data practitioners in contexts from Iran to Zimbabwe, and from Vietnam to Egypt, might be able to work more effectively to hold state authorities to account.
Opening Up
The challenges around effectively making use of open data are not insignificant, even in political environments that are commonly perceived as ‘open’. Practices ranging from non-disclosure of data to “open-washing” are being deployed to counter the work of open data practitioners around the world. And this isn’t solely the reserve of authoritarian governments — even democratic states can be resistant to open practices.
In 2020, Open & Shut will continue to develop space for open data practitioners to share their experiences and strategies for working in some of the most challenging environments globally.
We hope that you’ll find our work in the coming year to be useful for your work. We’re always open for suggestions about how to improve, and for new areas to explore in our work — if you’d like to get in touch, please drop us a line at [email protected].