I don't disagree. It's actually enormously difficult to get governments to provide data, especially data that might make them uncomfortable.
My hope is that longer term we could end up in a world where we have a more iterative review of government where we're less driven by the scandal that we can nail someone, particularly a public servant, to the wall against over a particular error. I'd rather end up in a place where we try to iterate around solutions. Actually spotting errors in government is seen as a good thing because it allows us to iterate and make it better rather than something that drives the scandal, particularly if it's the type of problem that's really non-strategic but can end up eating everybody's time.
This would certainly be the place I would love to go. The way I think you've got to go about it, as I mentioned earlier, is that you have to think about how you're going to draft this stuff into legislation because, when you draft it into legislation, it forces parliamentarians and it forces the government to think about what is actually high leverage data and what is the data that will cause us to behave in ways that we want to behave. They'll accept a longer-term plan.
The NPRI dataset, the one around pollution, I think is a wonderful example of a government's potentially embarrassing dataset, and yet, now encoded in legislation, it causes all the incentives both in the private sector and in government to be wonderfully aligned around how we minimize pollution. So I think finding those types of leverage points is going to be critical.
The other thing is, ultimately we do have access to information legislation that should allow us to have access to this data. So if I was going to be thinking about how we prod governments along, I'd just tweak the access to information legislation so that it says that when I make a request, I'm allowed to request a dataset, and you're not allowed to hand it to me in PDF or on printed sheets; you actually have to hand me a disc or send me a file that gives the database in a machine-readable way. At that point I can get the data either way. Aren't you better off making it accessible to me so that I don't eat up a whole bunch of time making requests over and over and over again? Would it not actually reduce the burden on government?
So we actually have access to the data either way. The questions are: how do we make it painless and how do we make it easier for government? So let's put it in the legislation where we have to and then let's improve the access to information legislation.