I Sing the Data Open

And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?
“I Sing the Body Electric”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855

I recently spent a few days preparing and researching for a talk on Open Gov / Gov 2.0 and Open Data. It served as a fantastic opportunity to re-visit these concepts and to think through my own perspectives on the relationship between Open Data and Open Gov and what they mean to us as citizens.

Here are 3 themes I captured as a result of this exercise:

1. Public vs Open

As I revisited some oldie but goodie definitions of Open Gov, 8 Principles of Open Dataand 3 Laws of Open DataI tried to capture the relationship between these concepts in one visual. The end-result is this diagram, emphasizing that in the realm of “Public” vs. “Private”, Open Data and Open Government Data are firmly in the Public domain.

This helps avoid confusion and concerns around citizens’ private information being revealed through open data initiatives. Also, it helps to emphasize that some data, such as sensitive or diplomatic data, belongs in the realm of “Private” (can you say WikiLeaks)?

Much of this was prompted by a great article by Melanie Chernoff “What “open data” means – and what it doesn’t” where she articulates the differences between Open Data and Publically Available Data: “All open data is publicly available. But not all publicly available data is open”.

2. Progression of Open Gov Initiatives

Reading through a great post Killer open-data apps from around the world by James McKinney from Montréal Ouvert it dawned on me that there’s a natural progression of how governments connect with citizens using Open Gov initiatives. It’s represented by these three categories of websites/resources each with increasingly higher level of involvement and commitment on the part of citizens (and consequently of the government):

• transparency: “here’s the data“ Gov-2-Citizen (G2C), 1-way communication, e.g. sites like opencongress.org , openparliament.ca , etc.
• participation: “speak out“ G2C + C2G, 2-way communication, e.g. sites like americaspeakingout.com , citizenfactory.com
• engagement: 2-way interaction, “take action!“, e.g. sites like apathyisboring.com, mysociety.org

The higher the level of involvement or C2G/G2C interaction, the more pronounced is the importance of social media, Web2.0 and mobile tools.

3. The “Body” of Open Gov

As I tried to find an analogy to illustrate the relationship between Open Data and Open Gov, I thought back to Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric”. In it Whitman explores the interconnectedness of the human Body and the Soul, and celebrates importance of the Body in making the Soul “real”. Similarly…

Open Data is to Open Gov as the Body is to the Soul.

Open Gov is made real by Open Data. Open Data enables an open government to interact with its citizens, and it is Open Data that helps bring to life the principles and objectives of Open Government.

In the end I was happy my talk gave me a chance to revisit some of the basics, however pitiful my attempts at conceptualization and visualization may seem. At least Whitman led me to think of Open Gov and Open Data in more poetic terms; that’s how I ended up with the title of my talk: I Sing the Data Open

@Nik_G