Today we interview The Guardian’s Technology editor Charles Arthur on the Free Our Data campaign, aimed at persuading the British government to stop charging for non personal data collected at the taxpayers expense. To read the original article that started the campaign go here. (link)

MT Your Free Our Data campaign aims to persuade the British government to stop charging for data collected by public bodies at the tax-payers expense. Can you tell us why you think this issue is important?

CA Because if you set a price on data - any sort of data - then you naturally limit the number of people or organisations that are going to use it. If Google demanded five pounds before you could use Google Maps, or set up a blog on its Blogger.com, then there would be fewer people using them - even though anyone who can afford a computer, or internet access, can almost certainly afford the five pounds. Price limits use. Economists know that.

So if you want data or information to have the widest possible use, you set the lowest possible price on them. In the web age, the lowest possible price is the price of connecting - which is assumed. So why is the price important when it comes to information and data collected by UK government organisations? Because the information is being collected on our behalf, as taxpayers and government subjects (what a horrible phrase that latter is; I’m sure no American thinks of themselves as a “subject”) - no, better to say as taxpayers and *citizens*. If the government, or its organisations, aren’t collecting the data in order to benefit us as citizens, then they should not be collecting it.

But if they are collecting it, then they should make it available to us. The experience of the web shows that the zillions of people out there can make more interesting use of the data that government generates than government itself can. The example of theyworkforyou.com (link) is a wonderful one. The data there is what Parliament generates (which has its own copyright - Parliamentary copyright). Searched through Hansard, it’s pretty hard to navigate. Searched via TheyWorkForYou - which is what MPs do - it is much easier; that and publicwhip.org, (link) another MySociety.org (link) mashup, are the sites that MPs use. Isn’t that indicative? A non-government site is the one which MPs use to find out about what’s been going on in Parliament?

OK, so we have two points:
(1) Government data should be available to us all;
(2) It should be available at minimal, ie nil, price.

The latter is easy to argue - because these organisations are all government-funded, or supported, which means our taxes are what keeps them going in some way. The Ordnance Survey and UK Hydrographic Office stand out as “trading funds”, which more than cover their costs. They argue that they don’t cost taxpayers anything. But they do, in effect. The lost opportunity that setting a price barrier to data access means that we can’t see how people might use OS data to even better effect than there already is.

So our argument boils down to: make the data available; make it free. Then you’ll see people and organisations creating interesting applications, mixing in information that they gather (private companies can after all commission their own surveys or research about particular areas then mix it into free government data) to create a new product they can sell.
A US research paper suggested that the US private sector is much bigger in these fields because the US government provides data for free, on the basis that taxpayers have already paid for it. That’s why NASA pictures are free for reproduction: that’s why you all know the name of NASA, see the pictures from the Hubble Telescope, and so on. By contrast, can you name the place where European Space Agency rockets are launched?

MT So, how’s the campaign going?

CA Well, we started in March, and last week (Monday 17th) had a public meeting, together with the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts (RSA) in London. More than 100 people turned out in the audience, and on the panel we had Derek Wyatt MP - who’s very interested in the topic - and Carol Tullo, head of the Office of Public Sector Information, and Vanessa Lawrence, chief executive and director-general of Ordnance Survey. Plus myself, and Paul Crake of the RSA.

That we got so many people there is fantastic. There’s a lot of momentum for the idea. Some people in the private sector don’t like it; I wonder if they feel threatened by the possibility of having to compete with newcomers who’d rely on free data.

I think the campaign is going really well. I’ve seen a number of campaigns at other papers; I saw quite a few from the sidelines when I was at The Independent. The three important things are that:
(1) the campaign aims are achievable;
(2) you have backing from readers;
(3) you can sustain the momentum, with stories about the topic on a regular basis which stay true to the core campaign.

I think the aims are achievable: there’s a lot of questioning about licence models in government, especially with OPSI pushing its Information Fair Traders Scheme (under which the OS was recently chastised (link) 148k PDF.) Readers are giving it backing: I’ll get some input at least
every few days from someone who has come across the campaign and thinks it’s a great idea because they’ve had some great big hassle from some government organisation. And the momentum that generates is great; I had some concerns when we started that it might be hard to keep going each week. Instead, it turns out that you hardly have to throw a stone to find an example of daft government data licensing - inconsistency or contradiction or strange financial goings-on.

MT Websites such as TheyWorkForYou.com allow citizens to keep a much closer eye on their elected representatives than in the past. Yet in order to influence policy making we still have to rely on the old letter to the M.P. (admittedly through WriteToThem.com) or forming pressure groups and campaigns. Do you think this technology will ever lead to citizens having more of a direct influence over the policy formation process?

CA No; no technology that’s really widely available will affect the formulation of policy, precisely because it’s widely available. (It often works in the reverse direction. Cars are widely available, but they haven’t directly led to policies through drivers lobbying. It’s more that politicians don’t want to disturb the voters. But you don’t get car drivers lobbying for this or that. See how ineffective it is over, say, the fuel escalator - that took semi-direct action by a particular group.)

The reason is that policy gets formulated through political processes, at whatever level - council, parish council, regional, national. There’s a Darwinian process going on: those who can bear to live through the back-and-forth and horse-trading of getting a policy idea pushed through, and the policies which can be tweaked enough, tend to work. Those which don’t go through a rigorous form of that process - say, the poll tax, which was effectively imposed top-down, or even the Iraq invasion, which is a form of policy (because it’s certainly upped our public spending by billions) don’t get support, and kill off their political creators.

So policy will still get made in the same apparently obscure way, because most people don’t have the patience to see policies get made. “Transparent” sites like TheyWorkForYou only show us what happens as the policy becomes visible but not the backroom discussions that see them formulated. The reality: “citizens” can’t have a direct influence on policy formulation. We have better things to do with our lives.

MT The Free Our Data campaign is highly targeted yet fits in to the wider debate about copyright, DRM and intellectual property sparked by the ubiquity of the Internet. Who do you feel is winning this debate? And also who is winning the fight?

CA The copyright debate - more specifically, the new technology becoming available - is starting to make the content licensors shift position. This morning I read something about the Microsoft Zune player (much talked about, not yet seen) which might do music sharing between players; and someone from Virgin Music was admitting that they might have to look at new ways of licensing the music, rather than just “you own, you must keep and not share”. Well, about time.

It’s not a straight fight, nor a straight debate, because one side simply isn’t turning up - the users. People who download stuff off p2p networks don’t, in general, send letters or emails to record companies saying “If only you’d license this in a different way…”

In that way it is, to use a word popular with various generals, an asymmetrical fight. That’s not to call people using p2p or burning discs for friends terrorists - absolutely not. It’s saying that they’re not fighting on the terms that the content licensors want them to. The licensors say “Come along and try out our new licensing model where you download it and then it disappears after a day! It’s cheap!” And the punters respond - inasmuch as they respond - by saying “I’ll rip the DVD, thanks very much, and transfer that to my iPod/PSP using this hack which someone in France/Russia/the US put together.”

What’s different about the Free Our Data campaign is that we are trying to take on the organisations head-on, to display the absurdities of their licensing systems. We’re also looking for the levers of power to pull. Yet that’s where things get strange. At our public debate the other week, Derek Wyatt MP professed himself mystified: he couldn’t work out which minister he would go to if he wanted to show his backing for the FOD concept. And that’s from someone who has worked Parliament with some success in previous campaigns of his own. There’s no minister for public sector information - at a time when public sector information is more important, more valuable and more useful perhaps than ever before.

So it’s the reverse of the media content debate/fight. We, the punters, are here trying to have the debate, but there’s nobody to speak to at the licensing side. I find that very odd - though maybe it indicates how governments don’t like people to be able to see inside them for the
information they’ve gathered about and for us.

MT Do you think a similar assymetric dynamic may arise with regards to the government’s surveillance of its citizens whereby as it becomes easier for the state to keep an eye on its citizens it also becomes easier for the citizens to keep an eye on the state?

CA I think that governments, at least in Britain, will always resist letting citizens see inside them as much as they want to see their citizens. It derives from the fact that this country used to be a monarchy; David Vaver of Oxford University gave a really good brief history of this at the RSA debate on the Free Our Data topic on July 17.(link) Basically, monarchs like to lord it over their citizens; and being beasts of those monarchs, British governments inherit that tendency.

It’ll be a real struggle to force open parts of government. That’s the best you can hope for. We have to use the few weapons we can - such as repurposing the data that is made available, and Freedom of Information - to lever open those parts we most want to look inside. But it’s a cultural thing. I mean, who voted for ID cards? Nobody I know.

Related

The Free Our Data homepage (link)
Charles Arthur’s blog (link)
The Guardian’s Technology homepage (link)
MySociety.org (link) [a collection of wonderful sites that allow you to find out what your representatives are up to and bug them about it -Ed]

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