[wdmmg-discuss] Open Misinformation and the Illusion of Transparency

Tue Jul 19 13:48:18 UTC 2011

You've triggered a good point here about open data. That is, you don't
encourage co-operation between data owners and data users by telling
the owners (or the public) how much they suck. Chances are they
already knew the data (or the data collection process) was bad and
that's why they were skeptical about sharing it. Further more, this
relationship is *really* hard to manage because any data user can ruin
it. There's no open-data-user-union to condemn people who misrepresent
data (perhaps by accident due to incorrect analysis) or use it to push
their own agendas.
We've covered this a lot in Australia; see
http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/gov20taskforcereport/chapter5.htm#a6
"Data quality, embarrassment and inconvenient truths" or
http://egovau.blogspot.com/2011/06/could-fear-of-adopting-social-media-be.html
"Could the fear of adopting social media be due to a fear of death?"
replacing social media with open data. And to the latter point about
comments on incompleteness and ethics, we've seen some media outlets
using open data - spending data - to write some very fanciful stories
to sell more newspapers.

So, there has to be a very artful and considerate way of saying "This
data is incomplete and we all know it". It's bad to have a red
flashing text statement on every page insinuating how mismanaged
government finances are. It's just as bad for everyone's interest to
not make it obvious because what if someone was looking at incomplete
data and asking "Why isn't the UK spending enough on education in my
backyard?!".

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 10:56 PM, William Waites <ww at styx.org> wrote:
>
> Some thoughts on the spending data at http://data.gov.uk/openspending
>
>    http://eris.okfn.org/ww/2011/07/misinformation
>
> --
> William Waites                <mailto:ww at styx.org>
> http://river.styx.org/ww/        <sip:ww at styx.org>
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