Would you buy shoes from your government?

Nike sells shoes and wants you to buy them. To get you to buy their shoes, Nike will get its marketing experts to design a colourful advert, with attractive pictures and with some information about the quality of the shoe, its price and where you can get it.

The government provides services and wants you to use them. Of course that is a very optimistic assumption, but lets stick with it for a while. One of the services the governments provides is the publishing information about its work and inviting citizens to engage. City councils publish information about new building zone and about public investment plans. Government ministries publish information about their policy or their annual budget. In theory the idea is, that you and I access this information provided by the government and make use of it.

But government administrators, unlike Nike, usually don't have much competition and their services are paid for irrespective of usage. So  some administrators may not care how they publish information. Some administrators may prefer to go about their business without much interference from well informed citizens. At least this is the impression I get when I see official announcements in the newspaper using only single-spaced 10 point fond or official documents on the internet intelligible only if I invest a substantial amount of time to deciper its meaning. If Nike published their information like many government administration do, it could look like this:

This is the example Dave Meslin gives in his great TED talk on how civic engagement in communities is suppressed. We could add the example of the provision of financial data. How interested are you to have a closer look at large tables with countless numbers hidden away pdf documents deep down in governmental websites?

In the context of open aid data, administrators often question the need to publish more data in better formats. Who would use this data, they ask? Citizens, these critics argue, have no interest in detailed public information or financial data. Well, as long as information is published in extremely unattractive, inaccessible ways, that is true. But, as Dave Meslin says, the lack of use of badly presented information is not apathy on the part of the citizens, it is “intentional exclusion” on the part of authorities.

Let's take the example of the German ministry for economic collaboration and development, the BMZ. To be fair, the website of the BMZ has been overhauled and is much more user-friendly now then a year ago. Also, some of the financial information is presented in diagrams. Still, most financial data is found in tables contained in many different pdf documents. For a non-geeky users like myself, that means if I actually want to use this information for some calculations of my own, I would have to copy the information by hand. 

Compare to this the new website of the Swedish Foreign Ministry which is as matter of pure coincidence also called Openaid. Openaid.se presents a large amount of data, in great detail and in a visually very attractive way. The smallest financial amount that I found on the website is 129 Kronor, about 14 Euros! Swedish citizens are encouraged to understand how their government is using tax money. In addition, the data is machine-readable and everybody with the technical skills can create his or her own application based on this data. My bet is, that the degree of detail presented encourages interests and also critical questions from citizens. It seems the Swedish government is actually inviting critical feedback and engagement of its citizens!

As long as information and data is presented in ways that visually and technically discourage reuse I am not going to believe any administrator who tells me there is no demand for the publication of more and better data!