Cover of the book “The data of democracy. Open data, powers and counter-powers” by Samuel Goëta, C & F éditions
The book “The data of democracy”, which Samuel Goëta has just published by C & F éditions (272 p., 27 euros), is subtitled “Open data, powers and counter-powers”. This work, clearly marked as political, is prefaced by Axelle Lemaire. The former Secretary of State for Digital and Innovation from 2014 to 2017, through her own journey (up to her law for a digital Republic), underlines: “It is not a coincidence that the first open data projects were driven by progressive majorities, particularly following the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States” (contrary, in the first days of Trump’s arrival at the White House in January 2017, the entire section of the presidential web on open data had been deleted).
“The challenge of collective intelligence”
“Open data brings democracy to life,” comments Axelle Lemaire. (…) With open data, the bet is made on collective intelligence, on the unfiltered highlighting of the truths objectified by the data, in order to allow those involved in the debate to decide in full consciousness and then assume accountability for their choices. Open data is the sharing of information produced by administrations, therefore the sharing of power with citizens.”
Samuel Goëta retraces his journey, the fledgling beginnings of open data in France and his co-founding of the Open Knowledge France association, then of “the cooperative and participatory company Datactivist which supports projects for the opening of data and their reuse” (it now has 22 employees, he says).
“Open data has now invaded our daily lives: the Pokémon Go game relies on OpenStreetMap (the “Wikipedia of maps”) to identify areas where rare Pokémon can be placed, the Yuka application has long used collaborative data from ‘Open Food Facts as a source of data on food products, CovidTracker has made the indicators from Public Health France or Meilleurs Agents readable to as many people as possible, helping buyers to know the prices of real estate using data from the General Directorate of Finance (DGFIP).”
In his reminder of the origins, the author notes that “open data is also in line with cybernetic thinking for which the free circulation of information constitutes an essential condition for the survival and balance of democratic societies. This connection links the opening of data to the free software movement: its principles served as a matrix for those of open data. The philosophy of openness and freedom advocated by the free software movement has extended to demand the free circulation of works of the mind, beyond computer code.
What he notes further: “Supporters of free software are in fact committed to ensuring that knowledge and works benefit from the same freedoms of use, modification, copying and redistribution as the computer code of the software that they use. In the continuity of struggles for the circulation of information, librists participated in the definition of the principles of open data by defending in particular the use of formats with open specifications and so-called “copyleft” licenses which ensure that creations derivatives inherit the same license and preserve the common property status of the work.”
“A fragile ecosystem” in France
The book naturally covers a number of other themes relating to open data, beyond Free. Let us mention that it deals, among other things, with the training of artificial intelligence models, fed with public data before the arrival of the Internet and then the “looting”, according to Kate Crawford, of everything that is published online (see the case of Google recently). This book, rich in information, reminds us that the work of opening up data is far from being completed and provides clues in this direction. “The quality and reliability of open data to fuel democratic debate still remains an important project,” underlines Samuel Goëta, who speaks of a “fragile ecosystem” in France, with portals like data.gouv.fr which “would make people dream data enthusiasts in most countries of the world”, but which “rests on the will and energy of few people”. The stakes are not small, because open data “does not only serve to reveal facts but to transform reality, to ‘change the data’.” With two examples cited: the distribution of wealth in the United States (work by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez in 1998), showing from tax data that 1% of Americans received 20% of income, and the trial of associations in The French state calls it “the affair of the century”, against the lack of action in the face of the ongoing ecological and climatic catastrophe.
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From hippies to Gafam, from open source to AI, a history of the Internet – July 22, 2023
Richard Stallman, an authorized biography and a tour – January 12, 2010