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Transparency critiques
=================

Lonneke van der Velden

The title of the talk changed to *WikiLeaks as a data public*.

Please amend the notes with your ones!

From her Phd on data practices which make surveillance visible.


Case studies:
    * WikiLeaks Spy Files
    * Ghostery browser plugin
    * ObscuraCam/InformaCam


If transparency means "seeing through", then what is seen through whose eyes.

UK Transparency Agenda: Parliamentary datasets 2009, after scandal

Data base sociologist: Evelyn Ruppert

She says that data is never raw and clean information but how such data is presented is always mediated

"There are no data without instruments."


Question: Data = In a Kantian way data would be the things-in-themselves, which are not accessible as such as a phenomena?

According to Ruppert the data public is vigilant and auditing.

Clare Birchall: data has to be made productive and citizens have to become innovative -- the data is expected to create social entrepeneurs. Dorien Zandbergen is studying this in the Netherlands in the context of smart cities.


Informational capitalist democracy.

Information as a kind of reservoir which can be tapped.

George Simmel: sociologist of secrecy.

Andrew Barry: The development of openness does not simply tap a reservoir of data which was already there, rather the development of openness transforms what is worth to be kept secret and what is worth to be published.

Barry studies transparency in the oil industry as a performative device.  Information is directed at specific audiences which can review in a rational way, expecting a civil public and a civil process.

WikiLeaks advertises itself as a transparency website to improve openness but received lot of critiques like from Jodi Dean who argued that the assumption there is that information itself will lead to social change.  We know already a lot of things but society did not change -- it is a social problem not an information problem!


Constructive approach:
What WL is doing in terms of transparency?
   * how is transparency produced?
   * what is the role of digital culture?
   * Birchall: radical transparency: the mechanisms that disrupt dominant attitudes towards the role of disclosure in the political sphere


         questions of participation..


Luke Heemsbergen mapped transparency literature.
He shows how transparency is expected to be a
   * regulatory vehicle (within perceptions of liberal democracy),
   * to foster open debate (this is the deliberative version),
   * to enable collaborative production (in notions of reciprocal societies),
   * and to enforce revolutionary stances (in autonomist approaches).


He follows how WL changed its stance about transparency throughout its history.

What kind of transparency are we talking about?

Wikileaks is surrounded by investigatory projects > results of the investigations are dealt with by "research projects" as search engines to go through the leaks...

Coleman: cooperative channels of hackers (a specific form of digital sociality) -> can we interpret this in the context of open data and transparency? Lot of these temporary research collectives are associated with the hacker scene. They make information richer.

Lovink & Rossiter:
methods for network cultures -> standards by habit (book sprints, unconferences, etc.) a "seriality of formats".

   * collaborative production
   * accumulate experiences in a short time
   * hit and run quality but not spontenous


"The vanguard of knowledge production."

5 or so years down the track academia discusses these phenomena, by the time which they are drained of all life. (the normalization and recuperation of formats)

Can we formulate a concept of transparency tied to leaked data that has a connotation with this phenomenon of collaborative, investigatory practices within the hacker scene? Because it is from these practices that the tools and interpretative devices emerge.

Ruppert argues that the tools that come with the UK transparancy agenda are mobilised within a specific setting and with certain expectations. In the case of leaked data, this is not a corporate or a govermental setting, but the tools and modes of analysing come from different kind of actors, many from hacker communities.

Data public seems to fit better than the language of transparency because instead of making objects 'distinctly seen', data are added, analyses are added, interpretations can be instable. Data Public appeals to a collective, but not necessarily well ordered.

Research to follow: what happens with the analytical practices for interpreting the data -- not sure whether seriality will do the job. Kelty's recursive public is not very applicable.  Conceptual vocabulary to express the taste of social life in hacker communities?


DISCUSSION
------------------


Questions:


*1. working with an open data project in the UK, but the website is completely fucked up -- full of proprietary data formats and lot of 404 errors and missing data and there is no standard way to access the data -- so from a technical standpoint it is not really open data.  the transparency thing of wikileaks make me wonder if they are promoting any democratic discussion between the two parties.  a discussion on the same level.  even if WL is leaking governmental data then it involves transparency but not necessarily democracy.*

That is why transparency is not the right way of talking about it because it involved a whole repository of other things, notions about accountability and democracy, etc. But these links do not necessarily exist. Maybe the data merely points out certain problems.


*2. Assange and WL were given a lot of press pushing for overall transparency, but it is stronger when it is about transparency of governance and privacy for citizens.*


*3. The notion of transparency is that you can have a clear representation of the things beyond the screen. Hermeneutics as a concept works better as a creative act of opening things up. A dataset does not say anything in itself until it is analysed by somebody -- it needs a system of interpretation which makes it useful.*

Yes hermeneutics includes the interpretative dimension. But I don't think practitioners would recognise this term. Kelty's term I don't like but programmers understand it because recursivity is pulled out of their vocabulary -- I think that is a good move which hermeneutics does not do. So maybe the practitioners would not recognise themselves in it.


*4 Ritualistic element of transparency, a spectacle of transparency put up by companies or others.*
A performative dimension of transparency exists indeed, as seen in an oil industry transarency project
*What about the transparency in developing a transparency vocabularies? metatransparency! language used in relation to a specific field, won't be neutral.*
This is about leaked data in the digital context. transparency is an "umbrella concept".

Evelyn Ruppert is right that there is no way of publishing data without interpreting it and presenting it in a certain way.


*5. I like the idea of recursivity but there is something disturbingly binary there. There are many ways to hide information and one of them is to publish a lot of information overloading the bandwidth of the public and do a kind of stenography. So it is a false binary to say that something is transparent or something is not.*


*6. These words which come from computer science like recursivity are not empowering for everybody, just for computer scientists. Linked data should be something like that, accessible and empowering for everybody.*

Do you think data public is inaccessible? Big data was not, now it is


*7. Data Public does not have the connotation with interpretation.
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