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THE RILEY REPORT - August 2004
from Thomas B. Riley 
www.rileyis.com
Following is the Riley Report for August
2004. Please feel free to pass this on as you see fit. If you wish to use any or part of the Report in an offline publication please acknowledge the author or contact the author if to be fully republished offline. If you are not currently subscribed to the Riley Report (there is no charge) you can email
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This month's Report addresses the issue of information sharing by governments with the public. The nature of information has changed dramatically over the past two decades with the rise of a plethora of new information and communications technologies. Some argue that we suffer from information anxiety because there is so much information currently available in a multitude of formats. However, governments now have the opportunity to share information with the public in a variety of ways. Information can now be seen as an important tool in the evolution of eDemocracy, e-Governance and e-government. These issues on information sharing are discussed below.
INFORMATION SHARING
Introduction
It has become important for governments to facilitate better access to information in both the public and private sector. The growing influence of the Internet, and other emerging
communications' technologies, in all sectors of society is becoming a factor for government. Parameters for discussion of how an information intensive society is changing the expectations of the citizen shall be addressed in this Report. In our information rich environment we need to find ways for the citizen to be better informed in a comprehensive and productive way. In the emerging knowledge economy it is time we looked at the whole question of information rights from a new perspective. In the past, the push has been access to official government information. Much of this is codified in law in most developed countries and a trend is emerging in many developing countries.
As of June 2004, there are fifty-four national freedom of information laws passed and enacted, or being proposed, by national legislatures. There are also freedom of information laws around the world at the local, state and provincial levels. This trend to freedom of information laws started post Second World War. These laws heralded a transition from a culture whereby government released information at their discretion, to the citizen having the right to request the information. This resulted in the emergence of more information to the public and an expectation of accountability and transparency from government. The next step in this information evolution began with the rise of the Internet and its deep penetration into society in many parts of the world. Government information holdings can be a commodity and tool for economic development and a knowledge enhancement for society. The Canadian government web site,
http://canada.gc.ca, contains a click-on that provides information from weather patterns to information on health, how to file one's taxes (either online or offline), or how to find a job, and a wealth of other essential day-to-day information that Canadians need. Other governments, such as in the US, the UK and Australia, have similar information dissemination on their sites, with some more effective than others. This is a start of the process of information sharing. More is needed to enhance
citizens' information and knowledge needs. In a very short period of time we could see freedom of information laws expand from the parameters of access to government documents to encompass both the public and private sector.
Information best practices also need to be written in order to help the developing world. In an information rich era, combined with the rise of the dominance of the Digital Age in developed countries, great potential exists to democratize information at all levels of society throughout the world. Due to our new information technologies, information is not only a commodity to be bartered in the marketplace but also a potentially powerful democratic tool.
Information as a Democratic Tool.
Within the next few years, or sooner, we will probably not even use the word Internet, or Net, because the actual convergence's of technologies is creating a new phenomenon. The rise of cell phones, handheld devices and chip technologies, which will be embedded in our homes and offices and, soon, in humans themselves, though such advances have important privacy consequences. The benefits of new technologies also have their downsides which requires legislative analysis and new policies to address the emerging realities that are creating widespread incursions on peoples personal privacy. Now an individual can be connected to the online world through a variety of technologies. Voice recognition technologies in the home and workplace allow one to receive email, send a message, take a virtual tour of the office, meet others in virtual meeting spaces, go there anonymously with created identities, book a holiday, shop online from wherever you are, do research, book a movie, monitor the baby sitter and thousands of other functions, all of which depend on the needs and interests of the individual. Whatever the opinions or views of individuals and governments in society, it is evident that we need a far deeper debate and discourse on the impacts of technologies. There are concerns over ensuring that all citizens have universal access to the Internet (and are free to use it or not use it as they wish). There are serious, abiding anxieties about the digital divide that is occurring throughout the world. However, this is not to infer that governments should not move towards creative and innovative ways to share and distribute wide packages of information that could be of value to many groups and individuals in society.
The shape of information rights to come: democracy's best tool?
There are currently billions of pages out on the world wide web. Book publishing has flourished with many artists and authors coming into the public consciousness due to the Internet. Self-publishers have a tool to express themselves. Web sites are dedicated to new authors in many countries around the world. Blogs (web logs) have proliferated, giving self-expression to anyone who wants to communicate on any subject. There are online magazines and a surfeit of other nontraditional media that have emerged in the last few years. Webcasting, listservs and news groups are all channels of expression. The world is at the fingertips of the citizen, but the challenge is actually finding what is out there, accessing the vast amounts of information, both on government web sites and in departmental data bases, and analyzing what is or is not useful to the user.
The government of Canada is working to find ways to merge their databases to enable the citizen to take advantage of information stored by government. There are many technical problems being faced. This attempt to find ways to provide more information to the citizen reflects the desire to respond to a growing information-aware society. Information is shaping our world and has become a supreme commodity as well as a forest in which many people are lost and disoriented due to the vast amounts of information available from so many sources. Information is not only a piece of barter for the business world to use for competitive and commercial value. Information is now a precious commodity for the citizen. In these new online environments, citizens are increasingly demanding more privacy rights to protect their personal information. However, there is also a contradiction here as, at the moment, citizens are sharing and using personal and aggregate information more than ever before. But in a cyberspace environment, the citizen is becoming more sophisticated in understanding the impact that information can have on ones life. The individual wants to ensure that personal information is not abused. The individual wants the ability to control his/herpersonal information environment in cyberspace. At the same time, the individual wants unfettered access to all manner of information. But the sheer amount of information available, the ability to communicate information, and the value that individuals put on information, is bringing a new understanding of the nature of information itself. Thus, on the side of freedom of information, the public is starting to demand more information for all facets of their lives. We see more data on labels of commercial products; shareholders demand more information about the activities of the companies in which they are investing (not just the usual
'hyped' good news about the company's activities in the past year). Much of this trend has been driven by the alleged financial irresponsibility of companies such as Enron and WorldCom in the United States, and Nortel Networks in Canada. Citizens are seeking more information about many activities in society. The Information Age appears to be bringing more demands for accountability. In the years to come, the public will come to expect more and more accountability, in the form of enlightening information, from both private and public organizations. This demand for increasing amounts of information is being partly driven by the Internet where there is now so much discourse, exchange of information, and tens of thousands of blogs. The Internet is an open network, which is contributing to the development of open environments. This idea is spreading into society as a whole, resulting in expectation of more accountability from all our public and private sector organizations.
However, the downside of this equation is that we are experiencing information overload. The amount of information is like a dense smog spreading across the Internet. On the one hand, Google, and other search engines, allows us to find information in a split second while, conversely, we are becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information being presented to us. This is why information and knowledge management have become so important. They are tools to guide us to develop methodologies we can use to make full use of the information available.
This plethora of information has led to the next wave of information rights that has begun to grow in the private sector, as government, the courts, public interest groups and citizens demand accountability and transparency. As the average citizen becomes armed with more knowledge (or at least has the capacity to be armed with knowledge), then it will be private sector organizations, along with governments, who will be pressed upon to become more forthcoming about the information held in their organizations. The private sector here means not just large corporations or businesses, but rather all organizations, including non-profits. Just as privacy moved into the domain of the private sector thirty years ago, when Sweden passed the first data protection law in the world, so will the right of access to information become a part of the private sector domain.
We have seen the results of private sector accountability after the dot.com bust, followed by revelations of financial malfeasance by large corporations. We have seen senior corporate officials taken in handcuffs into court and charged with various financial crimes. A decade ago this did not seem likely but this era of Accountability and Transparency has made such a spectacle inevitable.
Individuals' rights developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and have resulted in human rights laws and other mechanisms, such as freedom of information and privacy laws, to protect the individual from potential abuses and infringement of public sector agencies. One may predict that this trend will continue, as the recognition dawns that it is also aggregate rights that strengthen the citizenry as a whole. As the idea flourishes, demands for information on a more sophisticated level will grow.
Information Rights have the potential to become a part of civil society's infrastructure. As the knowledge economy grows, and the knowledge professional comes to be seen as a continuing, powerful force in our society, so will the demands for wider swathes of information, in particular, from governments. It may seem, at the moment, that we already live in a world with too much information. This change of demand for information could be for
'organized' information that informs, not overwhelms, the citizen. These trends are creating new problems for governments. In the spreading eDemocracy movement around the world the major emphasis is on how governments can better provide information to the citizen and how the public can take advantage of information that is relevant to their professional and personal lives and is available from government. Technology is the key driver in finding ways to allow the public to access that information.
Information is an issue in a new form. Governments will also be subject to pressures from emerging information forces in society. For example, the secrecy of governments is defined to the degree that information may be shared with the public based on current freedom of information laws. The lack of efficacy of a freedom of information law is shown by the narrowness with which government exempts information from the public. But the challenge for governments is not just to pass or amend freedom of information laws. In our new environments, information must be seen as the force it has become in society. Changing environments bring different attitudes. As governments go online with electronic service delivery, more content will become available to the public. But it will not be enough to put information up on a web site. Any information is going to have to be organized. The needs of the citizen, the user, coming into the site, will have to be taken into account. In many cases, there is too much information on a web site, which makes the site virtually unusable by the citizen. Thus, as noted above, information management is vital, so that policies can be evolved which ensure citizens are getting the information they need and want (not what someone
'thinks' the public want), while at the same time protecting individual privacy. Once governments put content online, a policy issue will immediately emerge. The private sector learned this in the early days of the web.
The growth of online marketing and e-Commerce brought with it major privacy and copyright issues. For the citizen, who is going online for government information, if a request is rejected, the issue will become: why cant I have access? Part of the answer to this is that government departments and agencies develop policies in advance to decide in advance what information can be public, based on their respective freedom of information laws, and make them publicly available in a comprehensive form. In an information-intensive society, citizens might want more from both governments and the private sector. This issue is central to the evolution of eDemocracy, e-government and e-Governance. The citizen is an integral part of the equation as governments go more and more online and seek to develop comprehensive policies to enact e-Services and other e-programs.
National governments that seek to engage their citizenry in the process of government may do so in many ways, such as:
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making more information available online from government to ensure there is an informed citizenry;
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providing web sites that seek input from people on all manner of government programs and issues;
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developing listservs and discussion groups on important national issues and other means to engage the citizenry;
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providing grants to organizations seeking online democratic activities, including the search for information;
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developing local community projects that embrace all levels of society from the academic world, to businesses, large and small, to non-profit and volunteer organizations; this can encompass governments in developed countries;
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developing web sites that allow citizens easy access, that are interactive, and that meet the needs of the community;
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ensuring information on web sites is easily attainable, in a form understood by the citizen and can easily be downloaded;
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providing search engines and hot links to ensure the citizen gets what he or she wants in the right format from the right agency;
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in developed countries where access to the Internet is limited to smaller sections of the population, working to develop information policies that encompass all the citizens in the countries;
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developing programs to teach local leaders in the communities to become information facilitators.
The Internet is a medium that has allowed people to involve themselves in the democratic process in new and unique ways. Governments at all levels and international organizations will increasingly be impacted by these changes. Thus, there is a need for awareness building within governments and international organizations of the changes that are occurring. This can be accomplished through educational and training programs. It will be necessary for governments and international organizations to shed their proprietary attitudes towards the information they hold. Of course, all of these recommendations depend on government providing sufficient human and financial resources to accomplish them.
For fuller details on this concept of information sharing please go to the latest paper from Riley Information Services Inc., E-government: The Digital Divide and Information Sharing: Examining the Issues at: www.rileyis.com/publications/research_papers/track04/index.htm
Thomas Riley is available for consultations, preparation of reports, presenting workshops or delivering speeches at conferences and seminars on e-government, e-governance and e-democracy. Please contact me at the email address below for further details.
Thomas B. Riley
Executive Director and Chair
Commonwealth Centre for E-Governance
www.electronicgov.net
Visiting Professor, University of Glasgow
President, Riley Information Services Inc.
www.rileyis.com