Transparency, a scholarly pursuit
An interesting post in the site NextGov (“technology and the business of government”) posits that “the practice of disclosing government data in a way that is meaningful to the public and holds the government accountable could become a growing area of scholarly interest.” In other words, transparency is gaining interest.
In particular, scholarly interest. The article notes that Obama’s transparency promises played a large role in making open government a priority by giving the idea a high profile, even if his policies in effect have been worthy of some criticism. This increased attention on transparency makes it easier to obtain funding for projects related to releasing government data in a usable format.
The article also notes that the body of work on the subject of using data to drive transparency is limited. I recently wrote about how some people are incentivizing the development of programs that would do just that.
The experts interviewed implied three things:
1) Transparency is complete. It means all of the related documents, all information.
2) Transparency comes with the responsibility of interpreting the data.
2a) There is a need for scholars’ perspectives:
“You might need legal experts to be able to explain how information fits into the statutory or regulatory framework; you would need cognitive specialists to talk about attentional issues, human-computer interaction specialists . . . and social scientists of some sort to do follow up.”
3) The collaboration between governments and citizens has to be real. (In fact, one scholar’s concern about Obama’s policies was the lack of genuine participation from citizens.)
The article continues to talk about the need and pursuit of funds for funding the academic study of government transparency. We, of course, are happy whenever any attention is paid to government transparency, from whatever angle. It tends to produce good outcomes. The scholarly angle in transparency can do nothing but add and improve to our current knowledge.
