Unit 7

Summary of Key Arguments in this Unit

Argument 1 - The digital era has seen the rise of new ways for public servants to share information, code and stories of research and implementation. Governments are starting to experiment with these.

Since the emergence of the printing press, governments have used technology to scale their capacity to share information they wish to see disseminated. From press releases to official reports, to court transcripts to tables of meteorological data, printing technology has enabled governments to get information out in various ways and to various audiences. When television and radio arrived, governments could use them to disseminate information that varied from pragmatic (farming advice) through to democratic (coverage of debates and speeches).

The digital era has brought with it even more new channels, from email to social media and web. Governments often use these channels for the same one-way communication purposes as older channels (e.g., public health warnings) but there are signs of new channels provoking new uses.

One innovations has been the use of blogging and social media by public servants to talk directly about their own work. This has allowed public service teams to open up quite technical work to niche audiences, including detailed project planning and user testing documentation which would traditionally have been private by default.

The digital era has also allowed governments to open up data in machine-readable formats so that that data can directly fuel technical systems operating outside government. For example government-run public transport systems now routinely open up their real-time transport information via APIs to enable journey planning mobile apps to work, a form of government openness that has no real pre-digital equivalent.

Argument 2 - There are a spectrum of ways in which governments can be open.

Governments can be open or closed in a variety of different ways, and it is important not to see the divide as uni-dimensional.

Governments can for example, be proactively open, publishing lots of information and data unprovoked, or they can be relatively inactive until asked for data, at which point they may be quick and efficient at producing answers to questions. Both highly proactive and highly reactive governments can be open, but in different ways.

Governments can also be open in a democratic sense - welcoming in voices and questions from people wishing to challenge power - or closed. (See argument 4 for more on this)

Finally governments can be open or closed in relation to the software that powers their systems. They can share and publish software under open source licenses widely and often, sometimes, or never at all.

Argument 3 - Both more open and more closed ways of working bring a range of costs and benefits to governments - there is no simple 'best way'.

All governments make some of their information open whilst keeping other information closed.

Some decisions about whether to make information open or closed are extremely simple - there's no reason a government would ever want to make its private encryption keys open and public (given that doing so would primarily advantage criminals and hostile powers, for no obvious up-side).

But the reality of public life is that many open vs closed decisions are much harder than this. For example publishing detailed information on the performance of individual surgeons in public hospitals may empower patients, but may also have serious side-effects, as surgeons may refuse to operate on patients with high risks of dying, in order to preserve their 'rankings'.

To make such choices well, public servants need to be open-minded and not fall into a rut of assuming that information should be 'always open' or 'always closed'.

Argument 4 - Democracy and openness in government are connected, but they are not the same thing

Over the last four decades there has been a surge in thinking and practice about ways of making governments more responsive and democratically accountable. Practices like participatory policy making, participatory budgeting, and events like citizens assemblies have caught the eye of many scholars and activists. As a result they have been moving from theory to practice in many places.

This wave of democratic innovation has happened nearly simultaneously to a wave pushing for greater openness and transparency in the operation of governments. This can create the impression that democracy and openness are essentially the same thing. But it is important that public servants understand that they are not identical.

Totalitarian governments are generally more closed than democratic ones, that much is clearly true, and dictators often attempt to suppress information that might lead to them being unseated. But a democracy can publish large amounts of data and information whilst keeping power tightly controlled.

Moreover, from a public service perspective, the changes that need delivering in order to make a government more open are quite different from those required to make it more democratic. Changes around openness relate more to the collection and publication of information, whilst democratic changes relate to reforms to decision making and budget allocations.

Argument 5 - The choice to work in the open can enable governments to be more capable

Governments have long used openness to support two traditional agendas - improving accountability, and producing a stronger economy. The digital era has seen renewed attempts to use openness to deliver both, especially by providing open data that is of use to businesses.

However recent drives to increase openness in governments have been driven by new internal, civil service motivations that did not underpin previous waves.

The first driver is the desire of governments to hire talented digital era staff - designers, developers, researchers, managers - who have a range of attractive private sector career options and who need to be persuaded to work in the public sector. The use of blogs to narrate team activities, open source code repositories and open data are mechanisms to demonstrate to digital specialists that government both works in ways that align with best practices seen in other sectors, that their peers have interesting and rewarding work, and that government offers challenges that can be both more interesting and more meaningful than found in other sectors.

The second driver is a desire to be transparent so that other parts of government can understand what work is being done within an agency, and thus collaborate more successfully. Some of the biggest losers from a historical culture of default secrecy, it emerges, are public servants themselves who have struggled to work out what is happening elsewhere across the public sector. So norms around opening up are partly driven by wishing to be 'good citizens' of the public service itself.

The third driver is a desire to balance being modern with being accountable. For example, governments may wish to disclose upfront if people are interacting with a human or a chatbot, and if a decision is being made about their eligibility for a program or service automatically or by a human.