Álvaro Graves is another of the guests who accepted my invitation to write during this month of the blog’s seventh anniversary. Álvaro has spent several years contributing to the Manzana Mecánica team. He has also become one of our national experts in the field of OpenData, advising various bodies on the subject. Álvaro is currently working on his PhD in Cognitive Science in the United States. He has given us this interesting post on the importance of having open data and how its availability could positively affect our democracies:

Data as democratic artifacts

By Alvaro Graves

Several of us have been complaining for years about the need for Open Data policies at many institutions that matter to society: ministries, municipalities, universities, etc. The question is why these institutions should implement such policies. I have written in several articles about the many benefits organizations can obtain by investing in Open Data (which, besides, generally requires a relatively small budget). Today, however, I would like to describe some of the reasons for implementing Open Data projects from the point of view of society as a whole. This doesn’t concern only government organizations, but almost any body that seeks to make its activity transparent to society.

Data as an artifact for accountability

First of all, I firmly believe that access to and handling of (raw) data are becoming ever more fundamental pillars when it comes to defining our capacity to decide and to participate in society. This is especially true of the relationship between citizens and the government of the day, but it also applies to the relationship citizen-AFP (pension fund), citizen-neighborhood, citizen-hospital, etc. One of the biggest problems there is (mainly with the political world) is the lack of trust and good faith toward the other party: fewer and fewer people vote for a congressman because he belongs to party X. Nor is it much of a guarantee that mayor Y belongs to church A or is a fan of soccer team B. An increasingly common trend is to look for data that lets you validate the quality of the candidate, even his “moral quality”. Examples abound; the most relevant one in the United States right now is the tax returns of Mitt Romney, the current Republican Party candidate for president: there are rumors of tax avoidance which, if true, would put the success of his candidacy in serious trouble. In Chile, a very interesting piece of work is what Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente has done with its Inspector de Intereses, where they show possible conflicts of interest between legislators' investments and the laws they have voted on.

Another endemic problem where Open Data can be a key player is how public policies get made: many times these policies are conceived and produced based on the “vision” (in plain Chilean, the “tincada”, the hunch) of the leader of the day, with all the biases that entails and with no other kind of justification. In a society that hands its leaders fewer and fewer votes of confidence, they need to make decisions backed by data rather than by the subjective perception of a small group of individuals.

The above also applies to justifying not only the policies, but how information about them is conveyed in the media: when we say that crime went down or that education improved, what do we really mean? Are we really comparing apples with apples? Is the difference statistically significant? There are questions that are even harder to answer: is it possible to identify a set of reasons why this change happened? Is it possible to identify the relevant actors connected to this change? The problem is that we stop at the newspaper headline, “CRIME UP”, with no further information. Just as in the world of scientific publishing, we need access to the data that justifies such claims, which are otherwise empty.

Data as an artifact citizens can consume

This brings us to the second point, which is more complicated than the first: to improve our participation in society, having nominal access to the data is not enough; we need the ability to process and consume it. This implies at least two challenges. On one hand, there’s the Open Data movement’s original “warhorse”: the online availability of data, in open formats and under licenses that are as unrestrictive as possible. The second part is how we get other human beings to be able to consume this data, especially those who aren’t hackers, computer geeks, etc. That is, those who don’t have the technical knowledge to process large volumes of data. How do we show the data that justifies the decisions of government bodies at different levels of depth for different people? An expert will want the maximum level of detail and granularity, while an ordinary citizen will probably want a more digested version (but stopping at the headline of a newspaper article is already too much of a summary).

Another opportunity that could have a high impact is letting citizens build a dialogue with the government based on data, instead of presenting demands based only on ideology without evidence. Although movements whose proposals are grounded in studies and “hard data” have existed for a long time (for example, the case of Educación 2020), these groups and organizations still need specialists, researchers, etc. That means this kind of discussion is possible only on “high-level” issues (e.g., national education policies), but not for decisions that matter to smaller communities (e.g., which streets should get priority for repairs in the town of Los Vilos?). Ideally, the great majority of the proposals made both at the level of state policy and at the level of the neighborhood council could be discussed with data to back them up, so that citizens can decide, not on the basis of vacuous speeches, but on which ones present the most reliable data and show the best solution to the problems raised.

A society of critical thinking

There are many ideas whose stumbling block is sociological and cultural, beyond whether data is available or not. However, our society is increasingly technical, and that puts more tools within people’s reach that use hard data to make decisions. These tools let us process larger volumes of data than we could ever have imagined a century ago. Still, these technologies need to be made more accessible in order to improve our democracy. If we really want to raise the level of political dialogue and discussion (i.e., discussions in and about the Polis), we need to be able to rationalize our decisions, strip the empty rhetoric out of them and open them to public scrutiny. That can only be achieved with data that justifies our opinions and decisions.