Is open public data a service or a right?

 Is access to open public data a service, like educationAccountability within the public education system is key to improving outcomes and attainment, and accountability is nearly impossible without transparent policies and opportunities for participation ..., or a right, like free speech?

Services are optional

Governments collect taxes and use the money to provide services to their citizens. Because taxPlacing transparency, accountability, and participation at the center of tax policy can ensure that burdens are distributed equitably across society. Technical specifications: Commitments related to c... revenue is finite, no government can provide all possible services to all people all of the time, so a government has to prioritize and plan carefully — when the next $50M is available, should the government spend it on education, healthcare, sanitation, or policing? Where is the greatest need? Where is the greatest return for the investment? What regions or constituencies have been under-served? How can the service be implemented on time and on budget?

Rights are mandatory

Rights, on the other hand, simply exist. The way people exercise their right to free speech can enhance society as a whole (e.g. Dr. Martin Luther King) or drag it down (e.g. Westboro Baptist Church), but the government’s and courts’ job is simply to protect and nurture the right, regardless of whether it’s used wisely or foolishly. People, not their government, decide what rights to exercise, how, and when. There’s no cost-benefit analysis, no communications plan, no implementation schedule — just get out of the way and give us what’s ours.

Which one is open data?

Our challenge with open public data is to make it less like a service (government-led), and more like a right (people-led). But how? Access to information — another key component of transparency — works like a right. Government is forced to follow not its own priorities, but the priorities of the people demanding information. Open public data, on the other hand, feels like a service: once again, with limited time and money available, the government (or other public organization) is the one setting the priorities: Where is the greatest need? Where is the greatest return for investment? What regions or constituencies have been under-served? How can the service be implemented on time and on budget? Two years ago, Charles Arthur wrote in an article in The Guardian that “data has gone from being jealously guarded and treated like gold reserves to be hoarded, to being a public asset for free use.” Yet that asset continues to be available — when it is available at all — only at the pleasure of the government. Governments, however well intentioned, consider open dataBy opening up data and making it sharable and reusable, governments can enable informed debate, better decision making, and the development of innovative new services. Technical specifications: Polici... to be a service that they’re providing, rather than a right that they’re supporting. We all know what happens to services when money is tight — they get cut — so how can we ensure that open public data survives the next banking crisis or budget cuts?

Be careful what we ask for

There’s no obvious solution, but perhaps we can at least encourage governments to think of open public data a bit less like a service by asking less for the service-like bits often attached to it. Open data is a big CSV or XML file, or an API. All the other things we think of together with “open data” — registries, fancy visualizations, reporting tools, web sites for interactive search and browsing, sponsored hackathons, etc. — aren’t open data, but just services offered around open data. It’s wonderful that governments sometimes offer those services, but if they think of them as an inseparable part of the open data they publish, and don’t publish until/unless they have all this in place, then open data will remain optional, thoroughly mired in the service world rather than the rights world. All of these peripheral support services could be offered by a third party; the one thing that governments have, and everyone else doesn’t, is the data itself. We — citizens and stakeholders — need to avoid being distracted by these shiny extras, and simply demand our raw data as our right.