FOI and deliberative decision making?

Director of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, argued convincingly in favor of deliberative decision making in his annual lecture last week. He pointed out recent researches in the field of neurosciences which have stated that our thinking is hugely influenced by social networks and social context at large.

In a nutshell, our reason is more or less a slave to our emotions and our individual desires are not always correct – for example we are rather inadequate to predict what makes or has made us happy. This results in a fact that the individual opinions we express in opinion polls and which thus generate into votes in elections are systemically different to those which are reached after a process of deliberation.

With this argument Mr Taylor gives a scientific ground for the preach for more deliberation, which is more than welcomed. In a times of economic crisis, diminishing political activity and lack of interest towards social issues citizen engagement has been suggested as a potential cure, not only to legitimisation of political decisions but to wider social problems as well.

Recently, a think tank 2020 Public Services Trust handpicked citizen engagement and increased deliberation as some suggestions for producing more efficient public services in their pamphlet 2020 Vision: A far-sighted approach to transforming public services. What should interest readers of this blog is the fact that both 2020PST and Mr Taylor mentioned the importance open and of easily accessible public information in order to capitalise the benefits of citizen empowerment and engagement.

It is tempting to assume that increased transparency and fully opened public data would automatically lead into better policy-making. Daniel Naurin has tested the idea in his research Deliberation Behind Closed Doors – Transparency and Lobbying in the European Union where he – according to front page summary, sadly I’ve yet to receive the book itself – argues that despite the fact that publicity forces the negotiators to adapt to the norms of the forum of the deliberation, the positive force of the publicity seems still to be overrated.

On the basis of Naurin’s research more questions arise. To name one, what is the effect of widely opened and accessible information to deliberation on completely public forum where negotiators are ordinary citizens instead of business lobbyists? There is a reason to believe that we don’t yet have sufficient knowledge on this particular question.

Evidently issue deserves more research. Of particular interest is the connection between free and open information and citizen engagement, in which information professionals could hopefully play a significant role. Also, what is the information that makes the most profound impact in the process of deliberation and from which sources does this information arise?

As Mr Taylor pointed out, we are likely to change our opinions according to circumstances. If it really is so, then the key to power indeed seems to be in the control of right information.

Should we perhaps study a bit more the art of cold war propaganda?

Empty archives syndrome and democratising archival information

In the preface of a newish compilation Freedom of Information: Open Access, Empty Archives (Routledge, 2009) co-editors Dr Andrew Flinn and Dr Harriett Jones highlight so-called Empty Archive syndrome.

To quote them, the concept refers to situation when “faced with the possibility that potentially controversial decisions could be released immediately into the public domain, politicians and civil servants might simply avoid committing themselves on paper, leading to an ‘oral’ culture of policy-making that renders government unaccountable, not only in short term, but also potentially damaging the historical record” (p. 5).

Quite strikingly the phenomenon seems to have hit hardest in the Swedish archives. According to Dr Fredrik Eriksson and prof Kjell Östberg the culture in Sweden, whose Freedom of the Press Act is regarded the oldest in the world and thus cited as a source of a national pride (p.113), causes severe problems concerning the public scrutiny of highly important documents.

Eriksson and Östberg mention several critics of the Swedish system, who argue that the Swedish freedom of information is merely a myth because most of what is of the greatest interest is not written down and hence not available for scrutiny (p.118).

Tightened government secrecy clearly isn’t a suitable solution to the problem of empty archives, although historians tend to love the newly opened archives of security organisations and other archives, whose administrators have not had the need to wonder whether their documents would go under public scrutiny or not at the time of their creation.

In  a case where polical culture is somewhat questionable the possible solution should arise from below. In modern Sweden – and EU in general – there should be no reason for authorities to fear written documentation and its public scrutiny. As Eriksson and Östberg also point out, “the real problem is that the authorities are flouting the rules and that a culture of oral decision-making has been allowed to prevail” (p.123). It is indeed our duty as citizens to demand better handling of public information.

In a larger scale, the whole idea of information created mostly by state authorities is rather arguable. We still tend to consider information as something that is given to us from above. Information created in the daily life of a democratic civic society is generally not regarded as important as the official documents with the state stamps on them.

Still, history – and politics – is made as much in the grassroot level as in the chambers of Whitehall or Riksdagen. And every social phenomenon regardless of its origins needs information of different sorts as its fuel.There is a golden opportunity for archivists and other information professionals to enhance the general consciousness of the proper usage of information.

One question relevant enough to be asked is, whether the empty archives syndrome would still take place in the case of deliberatively and openly created community archives? Would the full democratisation of archival information result in archives, where there would be no need to fear the consequences of the disclosure of documents?

The Missing Link

Good news from the field of civic society and open governance. A group working on i.a. the enhancement of the feasibility of web 2.0 in civic participation has published its final report, on which the Ministry of Finance is currently requesting for comments.

It is no secret that Finnish public sector still lacks certain dynamics when it comes to information policy and its usage on behalf of  deliberative e-Democracy and e-Participation. Right information for the right people at the right time is an old cliché used by data management professionals, by which we try to justify our existence. It is time this cliché was put more effectively in use.

A cliché it may be, but a justifiable one. In fact, the role of data management could be even bigger in public agencies. I tend to speak about extended data management (fin. laaja tiedonhallinta), which connects the traditional parts of data management – registry (kirjaamo), record management (asiakirjahallinto) and archiving (arkistointi) - with public relations/communication (viestintä/tiedotus), knowledge management (tietämyksenhallinta) and even data administration (tietohallinto).

I believe that in order to reach the aim of above-mentioned cliché and thus effeticely promote electronic civic participation certain measures need to be taken. The preceding clarification of the roles of different branches of information policy is one of them. Nowadays it can be quite unclear who is in charge of issues concerning the promotion of civic participation and freedom of information.

Someone should have a clear vision on the big picture and have a control of every dimension of information. For example, public relations and communication are capable of transmitting the information here and now, but in order to control the time-dimension of information archives are needed. They handle different dimensions of the same information but may never be in any contact with each other. Also, in order to fully utilize the benefits of an active civic society the whole idea of distributing only selected pieces of information is way behind the times. Limitations caused by the law on freedom of information (621/1999 24§) must naturally be taken into account.

A mere enhancement of the feasibility of civic participation is a good start but not enough. From the historian’s point of view equally important issue is the preservation of the context and provenance of the on-line discussions and other forms of deliberative policymaking. It is relatively easy to draw rules for the document management of authorities, but constantly developing and open-to-all wiki-environment is a whole new ballgame, so to say.

In order to achieve a sufficient level of preservation we need historically, societally and technologically savvy information professionals who are aware of the amount, type and provenance of the information as well as legislative issues. In addition to all that, they should be able to innovatively promote civic activity and civic society by means of freely and easily accessible information. Nowadays the gap between a technologically illiterate archivist and a wiki-conscious, microblogging pr-officer can be huge although their jobs should be inter-related in many ways.