I’m excited by the current interest in both making government data available, and visualising it to help people make deliberative decisions.
Jennifer Bell has posted a great set of slides about open government (produced by VisibleGovernment.ca).
Visualisation is pretty shiny. Try a search for Government Data Visualisation for example – you’ll find plenty of food for thought.
I think this is a great way to involve people in governance: facts and evidence are a key part of a deliberative decision making process. Using visualisation to help provide understanding and insight makes good use of data sets that could otherwise be opaque. Making (publicly funded) data sets freely available allows anyone to work with the data, and will stimulate transparency, innovation and civic engagement.
Any problems with this?
It’s a Delib habit to think critically about how technology is used. Like many technology-driven ‘solutions’ visualisation has passionate advocates, and I think that – understandably – a few advocates might be over-stating the claims for the power of open data and visualisation. So what would my concerns about visualisation be? Surprisingly few:
- - It’s obvious enough that the data has to be analysed correctly and presented in a useful, easy to understand way
- - Geeks (and we’re geeks too) like data and charts. They’re clean, they’re logical, and they can be made to look great. But people (and politics) are messy. The most amazing chart doesn’t eliminate the need for people to make a political decision that will affect other people.
- - Data and visualisation can be a powerful way to summarise and aggregate. For some problems they will be the most powerful and engaging solution. They shouldn’t displace the human insight that can be found from things like comments, stories and video evidence.
Is visualisation a win?
Absolutely. Used well, open data and visualisation can promote involvement, deliberation and better (evidence based) decision making. By allowing anyone to mine existing government data (collected often at great expense), new insights can be discovered, efficiencies can be found and value increased.
In short, open data and visualisation is a powerful tool for engaging people with governance.
Footnote
To end, here’s my favourite pie chart 
(via Flowing Data)
