The Data the Government Chooses to Publish

This is a cleaned-up, edited version of a dictated first-person statement. It serves as the case-study foundation for the open government data policy area.

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Israel’s commitment to transparency of government is partial.

The infrastructure exists; the contents do not

The basic infrastructure is there. There is an open data effort, there are published datasets, there is licensing. The scaffolding of a transparent state has been built.

But various critical datasets are mysteriously absent, and in their place on the shelf are some rather strange ones: the number of Steimatzky branches; a dataset about the businesses operating in Ben Gurion Airport. Things of very marginal utility.

The data I actually want

I would love to see data in my own area, in Jerusalem: the number of jobs created, the number of companies here, the number of startups, venture capital flows. A centralized data store that actually shares data that is useful — and that invites probity into government, instead of a tokenistic effort.

That is the distinction that matters. Publishing a dataset is not the same as being transparent. A portal can be full and still tell you nothing about how the state spends money, whether policies work, or what is happening to the economy of your own city. Publication without utility is a way of appearing open while remaining closed.

This requires leadership, not a portal

Fixing it is not a technical problem. It requires leadership, and it requires engagement with the people who might actually use the data — journalists, think tanks, researchers, and the public. Nobody appears to have asked them what they need. If you did ask, you would not end up with a library organised the way this one is.