http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/usefultransparency
Aaron is deeply cynical and deeply idealistic, and his essay is great
reading. Don't give up on transparency because of it, but definitely
take on board the central message that putting the data online isn't
enough to get the change you want (whatever that change might be).
Yeah, this idea about transparency not being an uncontested 'good' has
been around for quite a while.
See, for example Onora O'Neill's 2002 Reith Lectures for the BBC.
Lecture 4 in particular:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2002/
Within the same new book from O'Reilly as Aaron Swartz's chapter,
Archon Fung and David Weill's chapter on Open Government and Open
Society is good. You can read it in the sample PDF of the book that's
available here:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596804350/
These ideas are long overdue for wider absorption and adoption by
freedom of information movement (in both the legal and more recent
electronic understandings of that term).
You might also want to look at this article:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1495726
Cheers,
Andrew
On 15 Feb 2010, at 9:50 PM, Nathan Torkington wrote:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/usefultransparency
Aaron is deeply cynical and deeply idealistic, and his essay is great
reading. Don't give up on transparency because of it, but definitely
take on board the central message that putting the data online isn't
enough to get the change you want (whatever that change might be).
