Slides for paper on “Open Data and the Politics of Transparency” at European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference 2014, University of Glasgow.

1. Towards a Genealogy of
Open Data
European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR)
Annual Conference, Glasgow 2014
!
Jonathan Gray
Royal Holloway, University of London
!
Twitter: @jwyg
Email: contact@jonathangray.org
Web: http://jonathangray.org

2. The Politics of Open Data
Proposed three part research programme:
• Historical - genealogy of open data
• Empirical - sociology of open data
• Theoretical - normative analysis of open data

3. The Politics of Open Data
Proposed three part research programme:
• Historical - genealogy of open data
• Empirical - sociology of open data
• Theoretical - normative analysis of open data

4. Research Questions
• Where does the idea of “open data” come from?
• How did it come to possess the constellation of meanings
that has for different actors today?
• Who is using the concept, how are they using it, and for
what?
• What role might it play in broader attempts to theorise
about transparency, accountability, democracy, justice,
civil society and the state?
• What promise does it hold for democratic politics?

5. What is genealogy?
• Michel Foucault: “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary”
study of contingent and contested genesis of ideas from
“feverish agitation” of history
• Friedrich Nietzsche: unexpected conflict and mundane material
conditions surrounding development of Christian morality
• Raymond Geuss: “the exact reverse of what we might call
‘tracing a pedigree’” - i.e. - “disentangling the separate strands
of meaning that have come together in a (contingent) unity in the
present”
• Alexander Nehemas: not “some particular kind of method or
special approach”, but “simply ... history, correctly practised”

6. Example: Samuel Moyn
on Human Rights
• Against tendency to “monumentalize human rights by rooting
them deep in the past”
• Highlights recency, contingency, broken and episodic
development, and manifold origins
• Certain strands neglected – e.g. relationship between human
rights and the welfare state
• Other strands over-emphasised – e.g. the depoliticising shift to
focus on pity and “spectacularised” violence
• Raises possibility of a new, more politically charged, socially
progressive conception of human rights

7. What might a genealogy of open data
look like?
• Not just history of legal/technical definitions or key
actors or moments
• Need to untangle different threads that contribute
to giving open data the significance it has today
• Looking at the constellation of different political
visions and values behind rhetoric of open data
• Some of these threads and tensions between them
are alluded to in existing literature on open data.

8. Some proposed threads for a
genealogy of open data
• Public Sector Information, Open Data and Economic
Growth
• Innovation, The Invisible Hand and Government as a
Platform
• Transparency, Efficiency, Public Sector Reform and
Neoliberalisation
• Open Source, Open Access and Civic Hacking
• Open Data for Journalism and Advocacy

9. Public Sector Information, Open Data
and Economic Growth
• Public sector information policies in 1990s and early 2000s -
including debates about different copyright, licensing, pricing,
charging and cost recovery models
• Debates about the economic and social potential of geospatial
information and geospatial data
• Peter Weiss (NWS): “internationally harmonized open and
unrestricted data policies” to realise ““wealth creating possibilities”
• “Consensus view in US”: governments should not add
“specialized value to public data and information” (Stiglitz)
• Private sector actors more visible/dominant in PSI policy space

10. Innovation, The Invisible Hand and
Government as a Platform
• Circular A-76: “in the process of governing, the Government should
not compete with its citizens”
• Robinson, Yu, Zeller and Felten: “Government Data and the
Invisible Hand” (2008)
• Tim O’Reilly:“Government as a Platform” (2010)
• UK Government: “Open Public Services” and GDS “digital
marketplace” = “doing more with less”
• Steinberg & Mayo: “Power of Information Review”(2007)
• Free Our Data: “public-sector behemoths” should stay out of the
“knowledge economy” (2006)

11. Transparency, Efficiency, Public Sector
Reform and Neoliberalisation
• Open data and “new public management”? (Bates, 2014;
Longo, 2011; Margetts, 2013)
• UK Government: open data is said to play central role in
public sector reform,“dismantling the central state” and
redistributing responsibility from “big state” to “big society”
• Democratisation of information, centralisation of control in
key areas (cf. Roberts’ Logic of Discipline)
• Role of information and IT in Clinton-Gore administration’s
“Reinventing Government” programme of 1990s

12. Open Source, Open Access and Civic
Hacking
• Open geospatial data: Open Street Map (2004),
Public Geo Data campaign (2006), OS Geo (2006)
• Tim O’Reilly on open data in “Four Big Ideas About
Open Source” at OSCON 2006
• XTech 2007: “open data movement” and open
source for knowledge (Pollock & Walsh, 2007)
• Political reception of “civic hackers” like mySociety
and Sunlight Foundation

14. Open Data for Journalism and
Advocacy
• Comparatively marginal in political discourse
• “Computational journalism” or “data journalism” initiatives
which explicitly support “open data” - e.g. The Guardian, La
Nacion, the African Media Initiative and the Farm Subsidy
• Advocacy groups which explicitly support open data - e.g.
Global Witness, Greenpeace, Open Oil, Tax Hack
• Other avenues for exploration: access to information; pre-history
of data visualisation; the Social Survey Movements;
computer assisted reporting of the 1950s and 1960s;
“radical transparency”.

15. Conclusion and Further Areas for
Research
• Genealogy: open data is not a free-floating, ahistorical
concept, but a malleable idea whose meaning is continually
reconfigured in response to shifting conceptions and
practices of governance and democracy in different contexts
• Empirical study using Actor-Network Theory and
controversy mapping (Latour, 2007; Venturini, 2010),
operationalised using Digital Methods (Rogers, 2013)
• Theoretical reassessment looking at open data and its
relationship to government openness and transparency more
generally, drawing on historical and contemporary social and
political theory.

16. Thank you
Jonathan Gray
Royal Holloway, University of London
!
Twitter: @jwyg
Email: contact@jonathangray.org
Web: http://jonathangray.org