[foundation-board] Wikileaks blog post?

Thu Dec 9 01:24:26 UTC 2010

I'm certainly not in a position to say what 'we' the OKF think, but
I'm not sure that we're in the business of 'techno-politics'. Nor do I
think the OKF is or should be in the business of 'real political
content'. As far as I'm aware I don't think 'we' (as an organisation)
think that open government data will radically change politics, any
more than we think that plumbing will radically change morality. But
all this is beside the point.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about what government information
should and shouldn't be made public, how and by whom, and to what end,
and regardless of what one thinks of Wikileaks, the main point is that
Wikileaks is *not* 'open government data'. Wikileaks has nothing to do
with open government data.

Open government data is data which others are allowed to reuse and
redistribute (e.g. because it is in the public domain, or because it
has been released under a license which permits reuse). Saying
Wikileaks is open data is like saying that a pirated copy of Final Cut
Pro is open source software, and that a sharp increase in software
piracy should make people who promote so called open source software
think a bit harder about their so called movement (and question
whether open source software will *really* revolutionise film-making).

This has nothing to do with the fact that the material is from the US
(or, continuing the metaphor above, that the software is from Apple).
I'm not so enamoured with the Burmese government, but classified
information illegally obtained from the Burmese government and put
online is not 'open government data'.

Becky: I think you're right. We don't need to respond yet. I only hope
that a few people mis-branding Wikileaks open government data doesn't
pour any sand into the gears of open government data initiatives
around the world. I guess its good to test the bullshit detectors (but
unfortunately I'm not so optimistic that these work).

J.

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Ian Brown <ian.brown at oii.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 8 Dec 2010, at 22:13, Becky Hogge wrote:
>
>> I found this post a very good articulation of my own confusion:
>> http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2010/12/wikileaks-shines-a-light-on-the-limits-of-techno-politics.html
>
> I also like this post a lot.
>
> This is perhaps a restatement of the realisation a year or two back that (excuse my momentary controversialism) MySociety would not automatically cause an egalitarian revolution in UK politics.
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-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

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