GuideStar International's Blog

By Caroline Neligan, Director Partnerships and Development, GuideStar International, TechSoup Global

The Personal Democracy Forum came to Europe on 4-5 October 2010 to learn more about Open Data and Social Media activities in the region and to bring together activists in the space to meet and exchange ideas. Some overarching questions asked in this conference were:

• Is there a transparency movement?
• Are there common threads?
• Is it changing people’s lives?

My answer would be yes, yes, not yet – or at least, not fundamentally.

As you would expect from such an event, there was a rich conversation with lots of perspectives and so I won’t attempt here to distil this into a short report. But I think it is worth providing some overview and reactions to the key themes of open data and social media and the potential that exists to fundamentally change the way that citizens and government engage with one another.

In essence, people need to see that participation in e-government/governance makes a difference to their lives. But, there seemed to be more discussion of ‘impact’ in terms of how many people ‘like’ a ‘cause’ or made up a network.  But is this really impact? What was largely lacking was evidence of how social media platforms actually enable policy or legislative change.

However, this gap is not stressed with the intention of diminishing the event – the event was full of motivated, passionate people doing exciting work, rather that we are at the beginning of the journey that has lots of potential to be game changing but that is still in its early days.

I wasn’t aware of a delegates list (a pity) but of the 100 or so people in attendance, it seemed the majority were European activists with a policy/technology bent. There was some government representation; the UK Foreign Office, a representative for the German Christian Democrats, Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic MP as well as some participation from the European Union (although I’m not sure in what capacity).

Here is a link to the full agenda and speakers. I attended break out groups on Open Data/Open Government, Crisis Response and Transparency and Open Information in the US and Western Europe.

As is always the case in a regional gathering such as this, the differences between countries were as striking as the similarities. Marko Rakar from Croatia was one of the most powerful speakers of the event; his campaign for government transparency has left him a marked man by the government. He spoke with a mix of humility, humour and conviction that makes our complaints about government attitudes to transparency in other countries pale in comparison.

In this mix of contexts where government attitudes to open data range from inept, to inadequate, to obstructive and threatening (threatened?), Hakon Wium Lie observed that open data is in its infancy but he was emphatic that the laws that our countries are built upon is fundamental and that access to government data – that as tax payers we have already paid for – is a democratic and legal right. People need to be able to be able to access, understand and translate the data that is made available to make it useful to particular constituencies.

Building on this theme, Paul Johnston from Cisco stressed that we need to change the ‘black box’ of policy making and focus first and foremost on transparency before trying to secure participation. He also suggested that we shouldn’t expect large social platforms that are successful in generating large crowds to necessarily translate that success into policy or legislative change. Rather we need tools that enable experts, or people close to an issue, to suggest research, best practice or to discuss options for policy making.

This doesn’t mean that the general public will be locked out of the debate, rather we need to get ‘more mature about mass participation’.  It is up to those in and outside the government (and I think you can extend this to any institution which wields power or controls resources) to ensure people are engaging at a suitable level to ensure their input has maximum value.

He gave the example of the You Choose website, which engages citizens in the budgeting process and, because they provide a range of options and spending priorities, it encourages deliberation and an understanding of the trade-offs involved, therefore taking citizens beyond a single issue area.

In one of the final presentations of the day, Hakon Wium Lie compared the Web to the printing press in terms of its transformative effect on society and predicted that it will be around in 500 years time. But, he asked, who else will be around? Facebook? Twitter? Probably not. So he stressed the need for open data standards and transparency as a priority for activists in this area. This instead of putting pressure on politicians and other leaders to be present on today’s hot social platforms because if they go down, they will take a lot of data with them.