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Nov

14

Akron mayor Plusquellic “orders data to be available always”


I’m hoping Pho or Redhorse will gallop in and provide some inside Akron backstory on how this move by Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic came to be. From Ohio.com:

Plusquellic said Wednesday the city is launching a new financial information section labeled — Open Books Online — on its Web site.

Plusquellic said much of the financial data had been available on various sections of the city’s http://www.ci.akron.oh.usWeb site.

The new feature puts the information in one place and also allows computer users to access annual, quarterly and monthly data on what the city government spends and what it takes in.

…

Plusquellic said the new data will include daily posting of tax payments, historical tax information going back five years, local government funds provided by the state of Ohio and property tax reports provided by Summit County.

Now, if you go to that article and read some of the comments, you can see that the commenters – most of whom are anonymous – still don’t think this is adequate transparency, disclosure and accountability. I’m not prepared to make a judgement on their judgements, but I will say that few people take the time to understand what they’re looking at, and that’s part of what causes cities (and corporations and universities etc.) to clam up and roll their eyes at making information available – because it’s just data.  To wit, journalists can train for years in an area called computer-assisted research, an area focused solely on understanding what they’re looking at when they get records and data and need to decipher what they’re seeing.  It’s not reasonable to expect that we can all browse data and understand it – we’re going to have more questions.

Expectations of what you will and won’t find and what you can and cannot know from looking only at numbers must be absolutely clear and agreed upon.  If the person looking at the numbers refuses to accept the limitations of what it means to just be looking at numbers, then the commenters will never be satisfied.

It goes back to trust and the representative form of government.  If you don’t trust the very people you’ve elected, then no amount of transparency will make up for that.

Which is why getting out and voting is so critical to making the system work.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 10:38 am November 14th, 2009 in democracy, Elections, Government, Ohio, Pepper Pike, Pepper Pike 2.0, Politics, Resources, Tech, Transparency, Voting 

Comments

2 Responses to “Akron mayor Plusquellic “orders data to be available always””

  1. 1 Adam Harvey on November 14th, 2009 7:58 pm

    While I can’t speak about the reasoning behind Akron’s decision to open their data, I do have a couple other related items to add.

    Right now, Open Government Data (OGD) is quite a popular topic for governments worldwide. I’m a member of the W3C’s eGovernment interest group, and OGD is one of the topics we’re currently working on.

    The most important point to make regarding OGD, and it applies in this case, is that the data IS available. It might not be in a format that is intelligible to a citizen, but initially, that’s not important. Making the data available is the first step, and is just setting a foundation for further improvement. Once the data is available, it can be used by third parties who can develop their own applications to help interpret the data.

    So, you take something like data.gov and all its raw data, unintelligible to the common citizen, and you get something like Sunlight Labs Apps for America project which churns out DataMasher and This We Know, both third party applications that derive meaning from the government provided raw data.

    It’s a question of capability for governments at this point. I think it is a bit too much to expect local governments to provide data transparency at a level that even the Feds (and everyone else in the world) haven’t quite gotten around to yet.

    I’m surprised and glad to see Akron taking this step, whatever the reasons, and it would be wonderful if more local and regional governments (like Jefferson County, Colorado) became interested in opening their data.

    Another example: Board of Elections history data could be easily manipulated to find out turnout trends for particular precincts, or manipulated in whatever manner you might imagine.

    Please pardon the long, meaty comment. This is something I’ve been studying for months now.

  2. 2 Adam Harvey on November 17th, 2009 12:02 pm

    Hi Jill! I left a long, link-filled comment on this post the other day. Did it get caught by your spam software?

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