"Ajar data" / Notes on the traces of the open data board on June 15
Yesterday, June 15, a meeting of the Council for Open Data was held. As I understand, no one has yet written about what was happening there, especially not in the language of press releases, but what actually was there, so I will do it.
I will not dwell on what open data is, I am sure that everyone who reads this already knows, so I’ll go straight to the point and it’s about the advice itself.
" Open Data Council " is the name of a working group under the Governmental Commission on Openness, which consists of 35 people (see the composition of the working group ) and whose task is to hold regular meetings on what to do next with open data.
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I, Ivan Begtin, am the vice-chairman of this working group and participate in almost all of its meetings. And the only one of all in her incoming who writes on Habré.
So the advice is June 15th.
To begin with, it was not the advice of the working group, and in format it looks more like a 4-hour mini-conference. All this took place in the Ekstropolis hall of Yandex, an excellent venue, which barely contained about 150 people who came to the event.
Why conference? Because it consisted of a couple of hours of speeches with presentations, half an hour of coffee break and half an hour of late VIPs which were performed by Abyzov, Sobyanin and Shaikhutdinov (Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Tatarstan) plus, of course, from Yandex Volozh and Shulgin.
There were VIPs, representatives of government agencies, several application developers on open data and a couple of experts.
I still can not share the reports themselves, they are not laid out anywhere, I can share my own impressions. Many of these impressions are not only a problem of open data, but a problem of an established culture of communication in government.
Minimization of cooperation
If we are talking about open data as a phenomenon, movement and ideology, and not just as simple data sets, then the most important part of this movement is the cooperation of state bodies with business and civil society and through this cooperation the provision of services for citizens, the dissemination of information, education and much more. Open data is only a tool for public policy in many areas, ranging from improving the quality of life and continuing to form the investment and business climate, the development of start-ups and much more.
This cooperation assumes that government agencies provide data to the widest possible number of market and society participants, and those, in turn, create products and projects that help society.
This is how it happens all over the world. In Russia, everything is different.
Almost all state speakers didn’t talk so much about open data as about their openness initiatives and what kind of “ wonderful, incredible, amazing ” services they create for the mass end-user. Well, open data is such a small useful appendage.
Sergey Sobyanin talked about this exactly, who openly said that open data is not needed very much and that is why Moscow focuses on other projects such as gorod.mos.ru, about which he mainly spoke. This was mentioned by Shaikhutdinov, who focused on projects for the openness of Tatarstan in principle, and the representative of the Ministry of Culture of Russia talked about this when he talked about the portal “culture.rf”.
This approach is very bad for several reasons.
First, the meaning of open data is lost - projects that will create a business will, in fact, compete with mass services created by the state. And given that officials simultaneously create their projects that measure the number of visitors and downloads of applications, and they also control access to data, it is not surprising if problems with access to data are inevitable in the future.
Secondly, open data are published, including for the economy of public funds. Their economic effect can be measured just in the rejection of large-scale state public projects in favor of providing data to the public and the fact that these projects are created by commercial and non-profit organizations.
Minimization of dialogue
This is the problem of the majority of events with the participation of officials in recent years, the audience is perceived solely as passive listeners-consumers. For all the time of the mini-conference, not a single question was asked. Not because there were no questions, but because they were not covered by the program. Discussions are a rare format in general, but okay, one question could not be asked, although some of the speakers would obviously not mind answering them.
Unfortunately, this is not the first case in my experience where everything is organized that way.
Minimization of expert work
At the whole event there was only one really interesting report - a speech by Andrey Zhulin from the Higher School of Economics, he spoke about the assessment of social and economic effects from the publication of open traffic data. Here, on the HSE website, their detailed report is entirely devoted to this topic.
But it was the only such report, only 5 minutes were allocated for it. The rest of the speakers were either from the state or representatives of commercial projects, who completely forgot about the audience of the hall and sold their projects to the assembled officials and VIPs without hesitation.
What is happening in Russia with open data can now be described by the term " ajar data ", this is when the very idea of ​​open data has won and everyone reports on this triumphantly, but all the real work, real data is either not published, or is very out of sight. And the state populist services for the mass consumer, on the contrary, are gaining momentum.
I will not dwell on what open data is, I am sure that everyone who reads this already knows, so I’ll go straight to the point and it’s about the advice itself.
" Open Data Council " is the name of a working group under the Governmental Commission on Openness, which consists of 35 people (see the composition of the working group ) and whose task is to hold regular meetings on what to do next with open data.
')
I, Ivan Begtin, am the vice-chairman of this working group and participate in almost all of its meetings. And the only one of all in her incoming who writes on Habré.
So the advice is June 15th.
To begin with, it was not the advice of the working group, and in format it looks more like a 4-hour mini-conference. All this took place in the Ekstropolis hall of Yandex, an excellent venue, which barely contained about 150 people who came to the event.
Why conference? Because it consisted of a couple of hours of speeches with presentations, half an hour of coffee break and half an hour of late VIPs which were performed by Abyzov, Sobyanin and Shaikhutdinov (Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Tatarstan) plus, of course, from Yandex Volozh and Shulgin.
There were VIPs, representatives of government agencies, several application developers on open data and a couple of experts.
I still can not share the reports themselves, they are not laid out anywhere, I can share my own impressions. Many of these impressions are not only a problem of open data, but a problem of an established culture of communication in government.
Minimization of cooperation
If we are talking about open data as a phenomenon, movement and ideology, and not just as simple data sets, then the most important part of this movement is the cooperation of state bodies with business and civil society and through this cooperation the provision of services for citizens, the dissemination of information, education and much more. Open data is only a tool for public policy in many areas, ranging from improving the quality of life and continuing to form the investment and business climate, the development of start-ups and much more.
This cooperation assumes that government agencies provide data to the widest possible number of market and society participants, and those, in turn, create products and projects that help society.
This is how it happens all over the world. In Russia, everything is different.
Almost all state speakers didn’t talk so much about open data as about their openness initiatives and what kind of “ wonderful, incredible, amazing ” services they create for the mass end-user. Well, open data is such a small useful appendage.
Sergey Sobyanin talked about this exactly, who openly said that open data is not needed very much and that is why Moscow focuses on other projects such as gorod.mos.ru, about which he mainly spoke. This was mentioned by Shaikhutdinov, who focused on projects for the openness of Tatarstan in principle, and the representative of the Ministry of Culture of Russia talked about this when he talked about the portal “culture.rf”.
This approach is very bad for several reasons.
First, the meaning of open data is lost - projects that will create a business will, in fact, compete with mass services created by the state. And given that officials simultaneously create their projects that measure the number of visitors and downloads of applications, and they also control access to data, it is not surprising if problems with access to data are inevitable in the future.
Secondly, open data are published, including for the economy of public funds. Their economic effect can be measured just in the rejection of large-scale state public projects in favor of providing data to the public and the fact that these projects are created by commercial and non-profit organizations.
Minimization of dialogue
This is the problem of the majority of events with the participation of officials in recent years, the audience is perceived solely as passive listeners-consumers. For all the time of the mini-conference, not a single question was asked. Not because there were no questions, but because they were not covered by the program. Discussions are a rare format in general, but okay, one question could not be asked, although some of the speakers would obviously not mind answering them.
Unfortunately, this is not the first case in my experience where everything is organized that way.
Minimization of expert work
At the whole event there was only one really interesting report - a speech by Andrey Zhulin from the Higher School of Economics, he spoke about the assessment of social and economic effects from the publication of open traffic data. Here, on the HSE website, their detailed report is entirely devoted to this topic.
But it was the only such report, only 5 minutes were allocated for it. The rest of the speakers were either from the state or representatives of commercial projects, who completely forgot about the audience of the hall and sold their projects to the assembled officials and VIPs without hesitation.
What is happening in Russia with open data can now be described by the term " ajar data ", this is when the very idea of ​​open data has won and everyone reports on this triumphantly, but all the real work, real data is either not published, or is very out of sight. And the state populist services for the mass consumer, on the contrary, are gaining momentum.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/260389/
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