Open government--Progress and impediments in the digital era.

Roy, Jeffrey

This contribution to New Frontiers examines the concept of open government--its contemporary emergence over the past decade from both an applied and scholarly perspective and its impacts on our collective understanding of public sector governance both now and in the future.

Open government is hardly a new concept. Many definitions, such as that provided by Wikipedia, refer to the centrality of transparency on the one hand, and public access to government-held information on the other hand. Yet, over the past decade a newer and more digitally enabled approach to open government has emerged, one aligned with the Internet as a platform for not only transparency but also active participation and engagement on the part of the citizenry. In a 2012 special issue of Information Polity, this distinction is well explained:

There is an important difference between the traditional approach to open government and the current, renewed one. While the traditional approach emphasized transparency, current approaches also involve key elements of participation, collaboration and innovation (Luna-Reyes and Chun 2012: 77).

As this passage rightfully notes, much is owed here to former American President Barack Obama and his inaugural 2009 Presidential Directive on Open Government, a directive built upon three core principles: transparency, participation, and collaboration. It is the nexus between the second and third principles that result in what Lee and Kwak (2012) characterize as the ultimate endgame in this regard, a nirvana-like state of "ubiquitous engagement" where citizens are empowered to actively contribute to the creation of public value.

Obama's 2009 Directive would soon facilitate the formation of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), which today represents a network of some 75 member countries from most all regions of the world. Notably, not all member countries are democracies, and the word "democracy" is itself absent from the binding declaration of this initiative. Yet the declaration does refer to civic participation and commits "to creating mechanisms to enable greater collaboration between governments and civil society organizations and businesses." It is left to government themselves to define the sorts of mechanisms that might be sought: as one such example, many Canadian jurisdictions have created app competitions to leverage open data holdings as the basis of mobile device programs to access and process data for service innovation and other forms of public interest pursuits.

In an important Canadian contribution to better understanding OGP's scope and potential, Carleton University scholars Amanda Clarke and Mary Francoli (2014) examine OGP commitments and action plans across member countries, showcasing and exploring the diversity of approaches at play. Their findings suggest that most governments had approached OGP from a more traditional interpretation of open government, emphasizing information availability and access as well as strengthened accountability. Yet they also found rising interest in participative notions of governance--especially in the realm of service improvement (perhaps not surprising given the close association between e-government and online service delivery since the late 1990s).

In 2015, Mary Francoli further dissects OGP from a Canadian perspective through her independent assessment of the Government of Canada's Open Government Acton Plan (Francoli 2016). One important recommendation (one of the top five "smart" recommendations highlighted in the report) is to "move beyond informing and consulting to enhanced citizen collaboration and empowerment." Such sentiment aligns closely with the aforementioned spirit of Lee and Kwak (2012) and their notion of "ubiquitous engagement."

During the Harper years, the Government of Canada's Open Government Action Plan comprised three main dimensions: information, data, and dialogue. In her assessment, Francoli notes the need to improve informational openness (a significant source of contestation during the Harper regime that was often described as highly control-minded in this realm), while similarly making calls to increase the diversity and quality of data sets. Across both realms, governments have generally been more comfortable with the notion of sharing raw data than sharing information on their policies and decision-making practices and processes. Such is the basic difference between information and data: whereas the latter is raw in form, the former is processed in some manner, leading to policies and decisions that are the basis of governmental action as well as ensuing mechanisms for scrutinizing such actions and holding governments to account. Unquestionably, between information and data, the Harper Government was much more comfortable releasing the latter, addressing the former in a very trepid and some would say, insincere manner.

Yet it would arguably be dialogue (the 3rd dimension of the federal Action Plan) where the Government of Canada found itself most stymied by an absence of significant reform, mainly content to issue general and often vacuous statements of intent promising to leverage online platforms--notably social media, to expand opportunities for consultation and participation. As I explore in my own examination of these docile efforts, the fundamental contradiction at play has been the ethos of centralization and control at the heart of traditional public administration (and within the walls of Westminster central agencies, including in Canada's case the Treasury Board Secretariat which awkwardly houses the open government unit, within the Chief Information Officer Branch), and the outward logic of public engagement that underpins more participative notions of open government predicated upon shared governance and more networked approaches to public value creation (Roy 2016).

These and other tensions are masterfully probed by Amanda Clarke and Helen Margetts (2014) in their article, Governments and Citizens Getting to Know Each Other? Closed, and Big Data in Public Management Reform. Although their primary emphasis lies on the data dimensions of open government, they explore within the UK context how the emergence of open government entails a complicated set of cross-currents stemming from traditional public administration, new public management, and digital era governance (the latter most consistent with participative notions of governance and public value management). Importantly, this study also exposes and explains how data comes in many guises--notably open data versus big data, and how the latter's emphasis on algorithms and security considerations could not be more counter to any reasonable notion of "openness."

How, then, can such tensions be resolved in favour of a more meaningfully embracement of open government as a truly shared and participative platform for networked and deliberative governance? First, it should be acknowledged that such an embracement is a value-laden and subjective interpretation of where public sector governance should be headed (one nonetheless underpinned by the, at least symbolic, commitments of 75 countries). While the Obama era was not without contradictions in term of its embracement of openness-laden reforms, what remains to be seen is whether the President Donald J. Trump era denotes a stark reversal of many of the OGP hallmarks, with potentially a greater reversion in the US and elsewhere toward traditional public administration (emphasizing information control and messaging) and new public management (emphasizing market solutions and proprietary protection) as organizing prisms for public sector authority and governance.

A similar yet less dramatic reframing could also find resonance in Canada, notwithstanding the stark policy differences with respect between Trudeau and Trump. While the Liberal Government campaigned heavily on themes of open government and democratic renewal, the first half of their first mandate has been marked by political fundraising and secrecy, an aborted electoral reform agenda, and an absence of any new flagship digital government initiatives. That said, the Liberal Government has supported an updating of the federal government's Open Government Action Plan created under the Conservatives, while Minister Scott Brison joined the global OGP steering committee in March 2017. These somewhat contradictory observations underpin ongoing tensions between open government as a catalyst for significance governance reform both structurally and culturally, and a form of traditionalism-constrained incrementalism that aligns itself especially well within the confines of a majority government and the Westminster inertia of secrecy and control.

In tilting the balance toward wider governance innovation, we can be encouraged by the insights of a reputable Danish scholar Jeremy Millard, Open Governance Systems: Doing More with More (Millard 2015). Millard's guiding premise is that in order for open government to be a genuine catalyst for economic, social and political (that is, collective in all forms) innovation, the public sector must itself become part of a wider and more agile eco-system intermixing virtual and in-person processes in novel ways. According to Millard, "open governance is about linking and integrating the worlds inside government, as well as linking and integrating these with the worlds outside government for the specific purpose of creating public value" (ibid.).

While his template comprises different elements and terminology, Millard's call for systemic openness as a basis for stronger and more resilient governance (orchestrated though, not dominated by, government) weaves together elements of information, data, and dialogue in manners that clearly the Government of Canada has thus far been unprepared or unwilling to do. Millard's discussion of big data--and his acknowledgement of the confusion that exists within the public sector between "open" and "big" data also complements the effort of Clarke and Margetts in this regard, pointing to potential dangers as well as new potentials.

Indeed, in at least three important ways, overlaying Millard's effort onto the contribution of Clarke and Margetts yields some critical contours for future research. First, a greater examination of various forms of organizational, technological and institutional resistance to more open governance is a precursor to instigating wider systemic changes of the sort sought by open government enthusiasts. Second, a deeper understanding of distinctions between open data and big data and how such distinctions shape public sector actions and accountability systems is paramount to both studying and designing data-driven solutions within appropriate organizational and political mechanisms for execution and accountability. Third, Millard's piece especially reminds us that open government as a more participative governance prism can only come about if accompanied by appropriate democratic innovations (that have not exactly been central to the OGP thus far and that now face new uncertainty in a post-Obama era).

In sum, open government has emerged over the past decade as an important prism for public sector action and reform--and for situating government within a wider mosaic of public, private and civic actors. For any student of public administration seeking an understanding of its contemporary foundations and impacts, as well as the internal and external variables likely to shape its evolution going forward, the contributions reviewed above provide a solid point of departure (albeit and admittedly from a mainly transatlantic perspective). The story of open government remains--and likely shall always remain--a work in progress.

References

Clarke, Amanda and Mary Francoli. 2014. "What's in a name? A comparison of 'open government' definitions across seven Open Government Partnership members." eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government 6 (3): 248-66.

Clarke, Amanda and Helen Margetts. 2014. "Governments and citizens getting to know each other? Closed, and big data in public management reform." Policy and Internet 6 (4): 393-417.

Francoli, Mary. 2016. "Canada's progress report, 2014-2015." Open Government Partnership. Available at http://www.opengovpartnership.Org/sites/default/files/l.Canada14-15_ English_Final_0.pdf

Lee, G. and Y. H. Kwak. 2012. "An open government maturity model for social media based public engagement." Government Information Quarterly 29 (4): 492-503.

Luna-Reyes, Luis and Soon Ae Chun. 2012. "Open government and public participation: Issues and challenges in creating public value (Introduction, special issue on Open Government)." Government Information Quarterly 17: 77-81.

Millard, Jeremy. 2015. "Open governance systems: Doing more with more." Government Information Quarterly. Forthcoming.

Roy, Jeffrey. 2016, "Data, dialogue and innovation: Opportunities and challenges for open government in Canada." Journal of Innovation Management 4 (1): 22-38.

Jeffrey Roy is Professor, School of Public Administration, Dalhousie University.