Balancing costs and benefits of Transparency
Transparency comes at a cost...the costs of bizarre interpretations by ones who may not have the analytical rigour, but hold a major sway on public opinion. For example many a times Main stream media (MSM) may end up in writing completely tangential takes on data made available by Governments publicly. The costs of transparency in such cases, specifically the ones which are complicated inherently, may far outweigh the public benefits.
This sometimes sets me thinking. What level of transparency is adequate and sufficient for a fledgling democracy? Should the governments upload simple data sets on the public domain, or should publish their analysis of the data sets as well ?
There are moral hazards in both. The first is simply to leave the data sets out in the public domain, allowing everyone to feed on it, right or wrong or completely unrelated. If the take follows logically from the data sets, whatever logic it may be, there's nothing to say. However, if there are basic analytical and logical errors in the interpretation, or if the take is completely tangential, this would defeats the very purpose of bringing transparency in Governance. Complicated things needs translation into simpler words. The translator has to be not only good in analytics and logic, but also good at simplification and demystification of complicated things. The above combination is hard to find. What is easier to find is people who write in simple language. However, if they do not understand the underpinnings of the complications, they would end up translating French into Tamil when the requirement is translation into English. This could be disastrous in some cases.
On the other hand, ff the government withholds the data sets, and puts out the analysed information, they face the moral hazard of imposing a particular interpretation of the data, which could be convenient to the Government, but not to the public. Thats not transparency ethically. And this could open the Government up to accusations of being undemocratic/paternalistic.
In this spectrum fraught with extremities of completely nonsensical interpretations going out in the public domain, and a paternalistic perception of the Government , what should the governments actually do?
Transformation Professional | Ex- Deloitte, PWC, Hewitt | Strong understanding of institutional systems and processes.
5 年Is it, in the first place, the 'intent' of the government to share data? Sharing data even for generic analysis opens up the need for the government to respond to questions, sometimes not in line with the 'narrative' of the government. In a system where RTI itself is seen as painful, sharing data only opens up more queries. Personally though I am all in for data sharing - a KPI of which should be that the number of RTI queries drop drastically.
CEO Energy Efficiency Services Limited
5 年There is always a right to reply. But a reply is a reply. And "doubt" by its very nature creates more problems than what it solves. Reasoned debates are always good. But efforts shouldn't go waste in delivering clarifications and better used in an informed debate. That was the crux of the write-up
Release raw data-sets. People will make their own inferences; if you think something is wrong, the same media outlets should give you the right to write a rebuttal