Open government, love and care, and Greece

Many of us have been guilty as academics or practitioners of believing that the key to achieve better government is by ensuring free flow of information and with it public participation in government affairs.

This belief is like a nice story, but needs love and care if we are going to live it in the real world.

I have become convinced that information is the result of and not the precondition for action.  For open government, free flow of information requires opening up discussions on the meaning of terms like 

development, democracy, transparency, accountability and the like.  

The problem is, we don't like fuzzy terms like these.  When they show up, we are quick to jump to the typical answer that one thing is governance, and the other is whatever we think we do with information systems.  We limit ourselves to say that we create conditions for anything to emerge.  And we leave others (politicians, policy makers, aid agencies) the responsibility to define these terms.   We let them do whatever they like to do with these.   For us, the important thing is the information system, the technology, the new and quirky stuff like architectures, repositories, big data analytics, interoperability between systems, federations of systems, affordances of systems, user satisfaction, systems success, technology transfer, etc. 

Separating the technology from its surroundings is a typical, elegant, off the hook answer that I keep getting from academics and practitioners.  For the sake of being practical, and delivering systems on time and within budget.  

Open government is as much as making data available as building or rebuilding systems to make this happen.  A deeper discussion on the meaning for instance of transparency can lead us to ask ourselves tricky questions: whose transparency are we talking about? 

We could end up with discussions about why we really need IT investments, or why international aid agencies have to decide on what counts as a project to be implemented.  

Those parties that we delegated to define fuzzy terms could explain bit more what they want to do.  They could also explain better how is that they are trying to help governments.  

Open government in Greece has apparently gone very well according to official reports from the open partnership and from initiatives focusing on monitoring government decisions.  So the flow of information seems to have improved.  And the government is still committed to build more efficiency, participation, transparency and accountability in their affairs.  

But the country is once again in a very difficult situation, and there seems to be little hope in promoting more IT investments and with them better inter-operability, information quality or social media use.  

Living the story of open government requires money, but there is little of it.  

Open government has some bearing of responsibility in having lost an audience who does not seem to believe anymore in what has been promoted.  

The audience needs less of technicalities and more love and care, it needs to be listened to, not just being treated like an online channel.  

So where is the camera and who owns it?

Am currently hooked on watching "breaking bad" TV series.  End of fourth season and the main characters have execute an almost perfect plot.

It is almost perfect, except they forget they have been recorded on camera.  And they need to get rid of the evidence that implicates them.

Modern and post modern life is instantly recorded.  Or at least we should assume so.  The mobile conversations, the emails, the video footage, we leave our trail.  Something I already mentioned when I talked about our digital footprint in a previous blog post. 

Together with this trend about recording life, we are now assuming that everything needs evidence.  Before we argue for something, or we defend ourselves.  And this evidence is somehow a combination of digital footprint and other stuff.  So the writing in the napkin and the DNA in it still has some value and that can also be on the increase.

We, the humans, are not that perfect.  Our human camera, our memory, our word, our trust lies continuously in tatters.   We need to back it up.   

Bit of sad news to have to become mediators, prosecutors, detectives, lawyers and defendants.  In my academic world that is increasingly the case.  We cannot just assume students did all their work by themselves.  We have to check it with a plagiarism detection software.  Students on the other hand have their own devices to get information quickly.  Good for the good ones, and good for the not so good.  And we have to be careful with how we deal with important content (exams).  We have to be careful with allowing people to film our lectures.  

Why? Because we need to avoid fraud, foul play.  

And because in case of any dispute parties have to recur to evidence.  So we need to have it whilst others should not.  

It is a game of who owns the camera and who uses it and for what purposes.

I wonder if the same happens in other organisations where they do not have academics but employees, and they do not have students but customers.  I wonder if we have become trapped by this game of evidence and pressure.  

Who is to win this game? Is this a daily game, a minute by minute one? What purposes does it suit? 

Maybe the good news is that like Foucaultvian power, we have bit of freedom to protect ourselves and be savvy.  We still need good friends who know how to win disputes. And we also need good cameras.  

And we can be ethical in this game, whatever this means to us and whatever this happens to mean in a given moment and time.