The “Death of Open Gov” was predicted last week in the Washington Post when Obama’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra (Data.gov) resigned:
The program was off to a great start, with hundreds of thousands of data sets becoming available, and entrepreneurs building thousands of innovative applications. Then the ill-considered race to slash the Federal deficit started. The Obama Administration agreed to cut e-government initiative funding from $35 million to $8 million. Never mind that Kundra’s programs had already saved taxpayers $3 billion over the past two years.
But were rumors of open government’s demise premature? Indubitably, given the momentum of the free-the-data movement, as Wired Magazine’s Jesse Lichtenstein explains
Wired Magazine’s Jesse Lichtenstein explains in Why Open Data Alone Is Not Enough:
At least 16 nations have major open data initiatives; in many more, pressure is building for them to follow suit. The US has posted nearly 400,000 data sets at Data.gov, and organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and MAPlight.org are finding compelling ways to use public data—like linking political contributions to political actions
However, while open-government advocates have been uploading millions of documents in hopes of putting information into the hands of the regular Joes, it turns out that their efforts are often “empowering the empowered,” the computer savvy elites who know how to find and use complex data:
Take the case of the Bhoomi Project, an ambitious effort by the southern Indian state of Karnataka to digitize some 20 million land titles, making them more accessible. It was supposed to be a shining example of e-governance: open data that would benefit everyone and bring new efficiencies to the world’s largest democracy. Instead, the portal proved a boon to corporations and the wealthy, who hired lawyers and predatory land agents to challenge titles, hunt for errors in documentation, exploit gaps in records, identify targets for bribery, and snap up property. An initiative that was intended to level the playing field for small landholders ended up penalizing them; bribery costs and processing time actually increased.
Read the editorial here.