I tend to focus on what government needs to do in order for data to be accessible or compelling for citizens and lawmakers, trying to answer the question, "what does government need to do to allow legislative data to flourish, and how will that affect government?" Chipchase focuses on the manner in which people interface with technology, answering the question, "what does technology need to do to allow people to flourish, and how will that affect how we experience the world?"

He reminds us that there will soon be 3 million people using cell phones worldwide, and that this interconnectedness will have strong implications for how we go the business of being human, especially in third world countries. He points out that mobile phones are enabling people in third world countries to engage in banking through "air-time transcations". I’m also reminded that while we focus on freeing political data to a broader internet-using public, others are working to take that technology and integrate it into the rest of our lives, to the part that isn’t connected to computer monitors.

As cell phones in third world countries create unintended consequences like giving everyone addresses (Chipchase shows his pictures of cell phone numbers written over doorways on otherwise unindexed addresses, and remarks that our geographical system is already outdated) or enabling the illiterate to manage their contact information, democracy and government are bound to continue to be affected as well.

The Open House Project’s success has come from just such a public conceptual space, a precondition for real collaborative analysis and constructive advocacy. If the societal influences that affect democratic decision making are fundamentally changed by the Internet and the broad public access that it promotes, it makes sense that a project promoting exactly that kind of public access would be among the first to demonstrate success. In a certain sense, the kind of public access that we’re advocating for is a precondition for the civically-empowered society we’d like to see, and the accountable transparent government that is built on it.

In the spirit of loosely connected observations potentially generating progress, here are some things I learned reading this weekend.

I finally got around to reading The Legal Research Manual, which a former employee of mine gave me (a pre-law student). The first few chapters were particularly relevant for me, since they provided a broad practical view of government information sources. I didn’t know about the US Government Manual, which is a yearly document by the GPO outlining the organization and function of the entire government.

The book also helpfully distinguishes between administrative (executive), statutory (legislative), and common (judicial) law, depending on its source, and further distinguishes between digests that organize this law based on either subject matter or chronology. All of the above are organized in both ways, leading to the existence of both an authoritative compendium and a running update. (For example, the Federal Register prints regulations from federal agencies as they’re passed, among other things, and the Code of Federal Regulations lists all of them according to topic.)

The Manual also explains judicial organization in great detail, with special attention payed to judicial jurisdiction (that construction may be a tautology) and practical approaches to researching case law and legal citations. Supreme court decisions are all apparently published in the United States Reports, which was good to see. Legal information, however, seems to suffer from an ad-hoc organizational system combining both official public prints and authoritative private services. For example, West publishes a “US Code Congressional and Administrative News” update, and digests of court opinions from throughout different levels of the Judiciary branch.

The linguistics appreciator in me loves that lawyers rely on a book called “Words and Phrases,” which catalogs legally articulated semantic distinctions. This would be a sort of legal ontology, I suppose.

Ontology, in philosophy, refers broadly to the study of being, in the same way that ethics is about action or epistemology is about knowledge. Ontology often gets brought up in discussions of structured data, and I’ve usually taken it to refer to the way that markup languages choose to recognize certain qualities or attributes as existent in certain settings. According to my understanding, a philosophical outlook leads to an ontology, or the ontic properties, those of existence, in the same way that the context of a given programming language leads to certain attributes. The radical doubt of solipsism leads to the lonely existence of the self, or the medieval metaphysics of Aquinas yields a complex hierarchy of angelic beings, just as RSS standards lead to attributes of title or publication time, or the context of HTML makes tags for italics or headers existent.

What got me thinking about all of this was Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated, which is a great read. He outlines categorization schemas, and concludes that the imprecise statistical organization that arises from crowds organizing on the Internet is more useful than the top-down methods of organization like card catalogues (depending on the context).

Intellectual interaction’s electronically magnified potential will have considerable consequences for democratic governance. I assume that the effect will be a good one. In terms of corruption and conflict of interest, I wonder what the ideal conditions are for it to grow? I assume that a low information sharing environment is one of the basic conditions for administrative abuse. I wonder what else helps corruption to thrive? Is this studied systematically?