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Other ideas in the series: Neurosecurity | Bionic noticing | Digital forgetting | Hyperopia
We live in an age of geek triumphalism - the social success of technology means technologists are in the cultural driving seat and their values are getting lots of traction. And one of those beloved values is transparency. In some ways this is nothing new. Many people, from activists and journalists to, well, most people, would argue that our institutions are too secretive and untrusting and that more information should be accessible to the people who paid for it or are featured in it. The difference now, and part of the reason for the mini-transparency boom, is that the technology- driven transparentists have tools for coping with, presenting and illuminating the great wodges of data and information that institutions can dump on your screen. Before the transparentists arrived to save the day, investigative journalists would wade through mountains of facts to find the revealing connections; and cunning institutions could create opacity out of a dense weight of transparency. Too much information is as bad as not enough.
Now, however, individuals are getting tools that put them on a par with enormous bureaucracies. It started with people like Tom Steinberg and the mySociety group of websites: something like TheyWorkForYou.com makes parliamentary output and the details of MPs' activities easily accessible. This year mySociety launched mapumental.com, mapping house prices, transit times and scenicness and showing the potential for generating meaning out of swathes of data. ReWired State is, among other projects, trying to make council meetings more transparent. Now this nagging from technologists, dragging institutional data into the light, is making bureaucracies see the value of putting their information out there, making it usable, understandable and accessible, and they're asking people like mySociety how it should be structured and formatted.
Media institutions are also realising that these masses of data don't have to be tackled with big print-outs, some reporters and plenty of coffee. When important info is buried in plain sight there are new tools to unearth it. This year The Guardian employed a novel process to find the interesting bits from 458,832 pages of MPs' expenses. They made transparency their friend and outsourced much of this process to their readers, offering anyone who wanted to join in random pages to be annotated. As mySociety has done before, The Guardian found simple ways to let regular people interact with big dumps of public information.
Nothing fancy, but understandable and useful.
It's not that we've suddenly developed an urge to peek under the bonnets of governments and corporations, but it's only now that we have the tools to do it well. Maybe we'll soon be surfing our bureaucracies as smoothly as we navigate the web, and governments will change their default setting to open, as the Obama administration is promising. Though, let's face it, it's equally likely that someone will soon be making money from selling opacity applications, whatever they might be.
Microbiography Russell M Davies is a regular Wired columnist who previously worked in advertising, launching Microsoft Office and Explorer. He organises the London Interesting conferences and blogs at russelldavies.com.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
