Week 4: Open government and public values
“Introduction to week 4 … Open government and transparency … Open government and participation … Privacy preserving strategies in Open Government“
Summaries
- Week 4: Open government and public values > 4.1 Open government and transparency
- Week 4: Open government and public values > 4.2 Open government and participation > Video 4.2
- Week 4: Open government and public values > 4.3 Privacy preserving strategies in Open Government > Video 4.3
Week 4: Open government and public values > 4.1 Open government and transparency
- Welcome to this lecture about transparency and open government! Governments are stewards of public money, responsible for allocating it to the societal priorities.
- For this, transparency is a condition and one of the most important pillars of open government.
- The importance of transparency is indisputable and has been highlighted due to its particular importance for Open Government.
- Transparency is a necessary condition for enabling participation in policy-making.
- Although we agree that transparency is needed, many people use the term ‘transparency’ loosely and there is no agreement on how to create transparency.
- You should be able to describe the concept of transparency and elements influencing transparency.
- In particular, you should be able to describe: what is transparency, information asymmetry and transparency-by-design, the main factors influencing the level of transparency, and the relationship with accountability and trust.
- The creation of transparency requires trade-offs, and creating complete transparency is often not feasible.
- That’s what makes this concept so complex, but also interesting! What is transparency? Look at this picture.
- Transparency is dependent on the stakeholders’ viewpoint.
- Transparency is an ill-defined concept and understood in different ways.
- There are narrow and broad definitions of transparency.
- In contrast, our focus is on data‐driven transparency.
- From a utility-driven view, transparency can simply be viewed as “the ability to find out what is going on inside a public organization”.
- A fundamental concept for understanding transparency is information asymmetry.
- We should therefore always talk about the level of transparency.
- Many initiatives fail to deliver transparency, because simply making data available does not result in transparency.
- The concept of transparency is even more blurred, as the work of government is performed by many organizations, and creating an overview is not easy.
- Luckily, there is often no need for full transparency it is important to be aware of the limitations.
- Even presenting conflicting views can contribute to more transparency, as awareness is created and thereafter questions can be asked.
- To create transparency, data is necessary, but not sufficient.
- By providing an overview of some of the factors, I hope you get an understanding how difficult and challenging it is to create transparency.
- So what is the relationship between transparency, accountability and trust? Trust is the foundation for any relationship, and also for the relationship between the government and the public.
- The importance of transparency as a way of building trust is highlighted in open government ambitions.
- Creating transparency should show that governments are not hiding anything.
- In which case, public servants might become reluctant to create full transparency.
- Transparency can result in more or less trust.
- Transparency and accountability are often used synonymously, whereas they are not.
- Transparency is a condition for accountability it is rarely a sufficient condition for accountability.
- Accountability requires transparency on how resources are used and decisions are made.
- In open government, the pairing of transparency and accountability is more difficult as there is no formal assessment and measures available to the public.
- Transparency can help the public to place issues on the agenda.
- The creation of transparency requires making trade-offs.
- The factors influencing the level of transparency should be taken into account.
- Ideally, mechanisms for creating transparency are integrated in the heart of the government.
- The development of transparency is a balance between feasibility and desirability.
- Only a certain level of transparency can be created.
- Releasing all data might not be entirely necessary to realize the desired level of transparency.
- Full transparency is often viewed as the ideal, but is often neither possible nor desirable.
- Finally, the question is: who is a transparent situation created for? For those who have the knowledge and time to use it? Or is the aim to create ‘transparency at a glance’ in which anybody with a secondary school diploma and a few minutes could understand the situation? In conclusion, transparency is a complex phenomenon, which cannot be easily accomplished.
Week 4: Open government and public values > 4.2 Open government and participation > Video 4.2
- My research is focused on open government, open data, and citizen participation.
- In this video we will talk about how open government can create value for citizens and support citizen participation.
- In a democracy, citizens can participate in the work of government and influence policies which directly affect them.
- Open government can provide new innovative ways for citizens to participate and have more influence over government decisions.
- This video relates to analyzing and discussing public values and best practices related to open government.
- More specifically, we will focus on how open government and citizen participation are related; on the examples of open government cases supporting participation; and on the benefits and barriers to citizen participation.
- The philosophy of open government is to harness the “wisdom of the crowds” for solving complex problems, and citizens are an important source of such wisdom.
- We therefore define citizen participation as mechanisms which citizens use to participate and influence public policies and services.
- Citizens can use these portals directly to search, analyze, and visualize datasets and to discuss their findings with others.
- Open data empowers you as a citizen to be better informed about what government decides and provides – such as for example choose a better school or healthcare facility, understand where public money is spent, or be aware of environmental problems in your area.
- By collaborating with the public, politicians can create policies which are more innovative, creative, and responsive to citizens’ needs.
- This initiative brings together citizens, policymakers, scientists, and other experts, to discuss complex science and technology issues, such as the use of human embryos in research.
- Besides participating in the design of policies, citizens also can help governments implement existing laws and regulations.
- In addition to opening up decision-making, open government offers opportunities for citizens to influence and contribute to how public services are provided.
- Hackathons, on the other hand, can be used to attract tech-savvy and creative citizens to help government develop new innovations such as apps.
- Citizens can participate in different dimensions of open government – use open data to make more informed decisions, get involved in the design and implementation of policies, and participate in the design and implementation of public services.
- We discussed such innovative participation mechanisms as open data portals, public dialogue, citizen reporting, and hackathons.
- Although citizen participation can help improve and innovate public policies and services, involving citizens in open government is not easy.
- There are a number of challenges to citizen participation – in brief, we need to scale up and make citizen participation in open government more mainstream.
Week 4: Open government and public values > 4.3 Privacy preserving strategies in Open Government > Video 4.3
- The decision to open governments and governmental data should take into consideration the impact this has on citizens’ privacy.
- A lot of studies have flagged the possibility of privacy violation when publishing government data openly, due to: the leakage or exposure of real identities when linking different data sources together.
- Before publishing the data, organizations are asked to remove any identifying information from the data, which is known as anonymization.
- Some studies in anonymization techniques show that anonymized data can still be de-anonymized and hence real identities can be revoked.
- In open government, real identities can be revoked due to the possibility of linking data together.
- Another privacy threat in open government is the loss of control over the data.
- Once submitted online, governments cannot predict who will be using the data and for what purposes.
- Data use can then result in undesired situations, such as one in which a data user identifies sensitive personal medical information.
- Two researchers were able to identify users in the Netflix reviews with their data from sites such as the Internet movie database, a source for movie, TV and celebrity content.
- Among these strategies are: data anonymization, changing quasi-identifiers, removing sensitive data, and publishing non-personal data only.
- In order to understand the four strategies, consider the case of publishing data about three users: Joe, Bob and Jan. Four data types are shown; user identities, quasi-identifiers, sensitive data and non-personal data.
- The first strategy, Data Anonymization, represents the most common approach that is required for privacy preservation.
- Governmental agencies adhere to the European data directives and data protection laws.
- Despite the aim that anonymized data makes users’ identities untraceable, user identities can still be revoked by other data types known as Quasi-identifiers.
- Examples of such data attributes are age, gender, and zip code.
- If there is sensitive data, such as data about medical diseases, this data needs to be protected as well.
- This is needed for some types of data or if we are not sure that the before-mentioned measures remove privacy leakage and exposure risks.
