Another day, another step in the right direction. Boris Johnson is opening up around 200 datasets about London along with an offer of from Channel 4′s 4iP fund of up to £200,000 to help developers to create innovative applications that use it.
Why is this exciting to anyone with an interest in local democracy? Well, it allows a large number of people to take existing technologies, adapt them slightly, pour the newly-available information into them and then present them to anyone who is interested. It creates fantastic new research possibilities, and allows developers to visualise the data in a way that may tell us something that we didn’t know already.
Continuing my theme from the other day, this is another way of crowdsourcing intelligence and judgement rather than expressed opinion.I suppose it’s worth putting all of this into the rubric that most of the bloggers on this blog use to define what is good and what is bad though. Creative use of policy-related visualisations are definitely a good thing. Anything that makes it easier for more people to participate in deliberative processes is, again, a good thing – especially if it involves getting lots of people involved in the design of services. Datasets + visualisations should help there.
My one concern would be the ‘arms race’ one. At the moment, government – representing (in theory) the interests of the nation as a whole, has one strong suit in it’s ongoing battle with sectional interests. It has access to large amounts of information and it has a large apparatus of civil servants, think tanks, academics and local politicians that it can use to organise, express and apply that data.
Government enjoys monopoly privileges. From a democratic point of view, this looks quite bad. The flipside of the question is this: If you make data that government previously monopolised open to the public, will it be used by a wide well-meaning group of civic minded individuals? Or is a body of people with a mandate to promote the interests of the nation as a whole handing one of it’s most valuable weapons to a well-financed group of vested interests? The question of institutional capture.
It’s certainly the case in the US that commercial lobbies have been able to supersede governmental bodies as the representatives of the US abroad. As just one example, it was widely acknowledged that the US position at WIPO in the mid 1990s was represented by commercial lobbies within the motion picture and music industries – and not bodies that were being managed from within government.
Like I say, on balance, this is a good thing. But we should be aware of the dangers.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
