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

Tue Jul 19 14:32:52 UTC 2011

Hi Will,

I think it would be good if you mentioned that we have discussed this
extensively and that information about the exact process that was
applied to the data was published both in a narrative
(http://blog.okfn.org/2011/06/16/opening-up-government-data-gov-uk-publishes-uk-all-central-government-spending-data-over-25k/)
and code (https://bitbucket.org/okfn/ukgov-25k-spending) form.

Further, I think it would be beneficial to seperate the concerns about
1) how government maintains its accounts and that lack of a
descriptive reporting format across all departments and 2) your
concerns about our presentation of the data that is released.

On the content: If you are proposing a large conspiracy theory about
how government is releasing false or incomplete data; please state
that. I just don't believe this, as I said before: there is something
extremely honest about this mess. If you are just surprised over the
state of bookkeeping - we all are.

On the presentation: yes, we need to find better ways of pointing out
bad data; but you'll also be interested to find that the one
adaptation we made to the OpenSpending platform during the UK25k
project was to add a big red link to report bad data in the top right
of the page. I don't think putting a note on all the data saying its
wrong fixes it: we need to find out which data is and which data
isn't. That's hard, and I'd be happy to hear your ideas.

- Friedrich

p.s. any accusation that I have removed payments to OKF from the data
is ridiculous. I actually want to know and together with Martin
proposed that a version of OKFs accounts without PII should be put on
OpenSpending.

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 2:56 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>
> F4B3 39BF E775 CF42 0BAB  3DF0 BE40 A6DF B06F FD45
>
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