From fossil fuel companies to Silicon Valley-based apps, private interests have benefitted immensely from New Labour and Coalition government open data initiatives. And the uses of public sector data, which includes health systems, traffic and fiscal information, have often put profit before the interests of people. A paper published by Common Wealth today shows it doesn’t have to be this way.
Mark Zuckerberg was barely out of his Harvard dormitory when open data campaigns first began to gain steam in the UK. In these heady years of dotcom hype and Ask Jeeves, concerns about how data was used and for what ends had, for the most part, one target: the government. For most of capitalism’s history, the state has been the main arbiter of data and statistical information about not only its citizens and their land, but also about the people and land it wished to colonise. Even at the turn of the century, it was beyond the realm of plausibility that entire industries might one day be built around the trade of data-sourced and -sourcing products.
The diverse coalition of civil society bodies and individuals campaigning under the banner of “open government data” (OGD) from the early 2000s advocated unrestricted and free access to public sector information, hailing it as indispensable for government accountability and digital innovation, among other causes. And while the democratic claims of certain groups advocating OGD remain unquestionably important, in a paper published by Common Wealth today, we suggest that the radical transformation of the public sector and of digital infrastructures in recent decades require us to rethink how publicly-held datasets are accessed, and for what ends. The current model of ‘open’ government data has been captured by private interests; the only way to democratise the use of public datasets is to ‘open up’ who decides how they are used.
