Is the Open Data Movement Giving Story Telling Short Shrift?

Tim Berners Lee in a 2009 photo by Silvio Tanaka

Movements to free vast caches of data from the greedy clutches of the public section are popping up all over the world, as one look at the Technology of Transparency Network mapping and tracking project will tell you. But there's arguably always been something on an "in rides the magic unicorn and democracy is saved" aspect to the endeavor. It's something of an article of faith in geek culture that openness makes things better, but an underdeveloped part of the transparency story is what happens with the data that actually helps to create a better, healthier balance between the people and the state. How does newly-freed, standardized, and vetted government data contribute to a narrative that leaves we the people better informed? That question was put to Tim Berners Lee on Friday, and he said its up to the journalists among us to use the data to tell stories:

"The responsibility needs to be with the press," Berners-Lee responded firmly. "Journalists need to be data-savvy. It used to be that you would get stories by chatting to people in bars, and it still might be that you'll do it that way some times.

"But now it's also going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse it and picking out what's interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it all fits together, and what's going on in the country."

Berners Lee, whom you might remember from his gig as the inventor of the World Wide Web, has been hard at work building and promoting the UK's Data.gov.uk data hub recently, a project modeled off of the U.S.'s Data.gov site, and he has a vested interest in proving the utility of freed government data.

And in this, the free data age's earliest phase, we can pull out two areas where the descriptive powers of released government data seem to have flourished the most. The first is visualizations, like, to pick one example of many, the New York Times' Casualties of War data viz. (The new Data-Gov wiki from professors at RPI also has a collection of visualizations built upon freed government data.) And the second is where the tale the numbers and info bits tell has to do with the corruption of public officials, like the U.K. government's recent release of spending data by government entities on everything over £25,000, which is what occassioned the pubic appeareance of Berners Lee.

But if the data being released by governments these days reflects life as it is being lived behind the scenes and on the ground, then we have to imagine that there's vastly more potentinal in the data beyond just creating pictures (no matter how rich the data they contain is) and revealing incidents of what looks like government corruption. At the risk of being reductive, politics is about stories. Life is, in many ways, about stories. It's a constant throughout the history of our species, at least in its more modern stages. People like stories. It's how we communicate about our world. Groups like the Sunlight Foundation*, in a nod to that understanding, include journalistic work in what they do, like what Paul Blumenthal and Nancy Watzman engage in. And there are other outfits that use data to tell stories; ProPublica's narratives on CDO cross-ownership comes to mind. But, generally speaking, the story-telling part of the equation gets far less attention in the open government movement than the importance of story telling would seem to dictate.

*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.