FOI officers walking on Finn ice

Nordic countries have traditionally been seen as strongholds of transparency due to their long history of freedom of information laws. As readers of this blog may know, Swedish freedom of the press act (1766) is considered the oldest piece of FOI legislation in the world, with Finnish act on government publicity (1951) coming not far behind.

However, a recent article in the leading Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, suggests that the state of FOI in Finland would not be as good as it is commonly assumed. A study group from the department of political science at University of Turku made FOI requests by email to 230 random state authorities, asking salary and bonus details of responding organisation’s highest ranked official. All this information should be disclosed without delay and without any further inquiries about requester’s identity or purpose of requests.

Results are interesting, to say the least. According to the spokesman of the group, professor Matti Wiberg, only fifteen (15) authorities responded properly and without delays, with eight more responding after another request was made. All others (207) either ignored the request completely or gave inadequate responses. Several of the authorities also demanded personal details of requester or asked requester to visit office in person, which they would not have been allowed to do.

What is the moral of the story? Arguably, results of the test underline the importance of FOI watchdogs and education on FOI issues. Since Finnish authorities don’t collect comprehensive statistics on FOI requests (as I was told last year by the registry of Ministry of Justice), responsibility effectively falls to independent journalists and study groups to gather data by themselves. This surely doesn’t make it any easier for academics to conduct research.

Logically, the big question that follows is why? It is tempting to argue that the lack of statisitics derives from the deep tradition of FOI in Finnish society. Document publicity is taken as granted and therefore there wouldn’t be any accurate need for statistics. Recent test proves, however, that the impeccable state of FOI in Finland is far from given.

Without available data on authorities’ responses to FOI requests, officials can’t really be held properly accountable, which arguably undermines the initial purpose of having FOI in the first place. Evidently Finnish officials have been given great freedom and therefore great responsibility to act in accordance with FOI legislation.

However, the old question of who is policing the police is still relevant. It is highly questionable, whether the Parliamentary Ombudsman of Finland has sufficient resources to pay special attention to breaches of FOI act, if 90% of authorities fail to conform to it. Another potential watchdog, Data Protection Ombudsman, for one, concentrates only on data protection issues.

Institutional issues aside, one could also ask what is the point of having comprehensive FOI legislation if individual officials subject to it are either unwilling to work according to it, or – as it’s perhaps more likely – not aware of the obligations it sets for them? Without further education of officials on FOI and comprehensive statistics to feed academics with Finland may face a threat of noticing that their good reputation in governmental transparency is based on rather false grounds.

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?

Archives, archivists and nation-building

Just a quick thought to put an end to over a month-long silence.

I’ve been wondering if there are some extensive studies made on the role of archives and archivists in nation-building and even as gate keepers of history and thus altering the human thought and ideas, which – according to Collingwood – history is all about. Question is, that shouldn’t archives be construed as a construction or an interpretation itself? It is always a conscious decision which documents are to be kept safe and which destroyed. Destruction of national heritage is also a widely used mean of warfare, recently used in e.g. the savagery of Bosnia in 1990′s.

Deliberate disposal of information on behalf of political goals is widely recognised phenomenon, but the formation of archives should be put under closer scrutiny, as well. An example: I was in the archives of Finnish foreign ministry looking for information on the Finnish-Hungarian relations and how Finnish diplomats used to emphasise the idea of a special kinship between Finns and Hungarians. An interesting notice was, that there is a specific dossier for the documents concerning the “kindred nations” (mainly Hungary and Estonia) although the whole idea of kinship between separate nations is nowadays rather disputable.

In addition to state archives there is the daily, grass root level archive forming where the archivist doesn’t serve any political or national goals. Even so, it is up to her/him how the future historian will construe the thoughts and ideas of her/his time. It would be interesting to compare archives from different decades and see if there are some patterns which could be derived from the zeitgeist of the respective time, assuming that deriving something from the “zeitgeist” is even possible.

The issue is fairly topical on a state-level scale, as some form of state-building is constantly taking place somewhere. Frederik Rosén has come up with an interesting article (Off the record: outsourcing security and state building to private firms and the question of record keeping, archives, and collective memory. Archival Science, vol. 8, 1/2008 p. 1-14), on which he raises a question on how privatisation of post-war recovery and security governance causes a lack of proper record keeping and archiving. He argues that this might severely affect future dynamics of societal memory and cause black holes in the history of a nation.

In my point of view, it isn’t enough to treat a single document as a subjective source of information, but the whole archives as well. Questions like who formed the archives, how it was formed, how the dossiers were named and what kind of documents were put in certain dossiers are not to be neglected. Archives itself can reveal suprisingly lot about thought and ideas of the time of its formation. It would be intriguing to read more on that particular subject.