Openness is finally coming to Finland, sped up by open source code and the Barack Obama administration, for example. Hand in hand with openness comes the desire – or rather, the demand – for making the administrative processes more transparent to the general public, considering that the processes are paid by the tax payers. The web promotes openness and transparency.
Openness is not a clear-cut concept, but the main message rings loud and clear: this is the way of the future. Even the line between openness and transparency is blurry. Financial assistance for a politician’s campaign should be fully transparent, but Google Street View should not have open access to everywhere – private areas are not meant for public access. Throughout Europe, Google has come to understand that American standards of privacy differ from European ones. Furthermore, open source code itself is available for all, but not everyone should take a stab at developing it.
Private people should certainly have their privacy, but are organisations entitled to the same? Despite the cover-ups and secrecy, their actions will sooner or later be discussed within a public Facebook group or on a web petition site.
Somus – open science
Funded by the Academy of Finland, Somus is a project that develops interaction between people, public administration and the media, focusing especially on the web. One of the Somus principles is open science. All of the Somus activities, from preparation to research and decision-making, are as public as feasible, considering the available project resources. Indeed, with the current tools, openness requires extra effort.
For example, anyone can comment on the weekly meetings prior or during the meeting or read draft articles from the wiki or micro journal and help develop the articles. The starting point is to share all presentation materials and research materials (such as the cleaned data for network analysis). Somus even followed the transparency method when making its Academy application on the web.
The Somus activities have been considered both as something to be encouraged and also borderline suspicious. Research colleagues suspect that someone will steal their ideas, as they are available online. Being open requires practice, but it gets easier after a while.
Guidance on open data for public administration
On 25 May, a guidebook titled Public data – introduction to opening up information sources will be published. The guidebook, written by Antti Poikola, Petri Kola and Kari A. Hintikka, is published by the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications. The goal of the guidebook is to generate discussion on whether national data sources could be opened for public use by using a state budget, and whether these data sources could provide a competitive advantage, promote civic society and also make public administration run more efficiently.
March is full of interesting topics! Note that you can still read the blog anonymously; but you can promote transparency by signing your comments!
Original Finnish blog entry by Kari A. Hintikka.
