Posts by Andrew E
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Hard News: Dirty deeds done by Digger?, in reply to James George,
A minor point: the FT (thankfully) is not a Murdoch rag.
Unlike the poor old WSJ which succumbed to his clutches in the last year or so.
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[ETA:In reply to Mark's post before last...]
No, absolutely not; nor am I. The reverse. I think increasing charges is the easiest resort of regimes that like to proclaim their love for transparency and openness, while at the same time lauding the principle of 'user pays' . Increasing fees for requests, or supply of information, is the easiest way to shut down open government, and then point to a supposed lack of public demand for the information as 'evidence' you were right to do this in the first place.
The difficulty with FOI, as that Guardian piece indicates, is coming up with dollar indicators for the benefits of openness, as opposed to dollar indicators for the apparent costs.
But in the long run, the costs of secrecy (e.g. sloppy policy making because you know nobody's going to be able to challenge you before the decision is taken, or hold you to account afterwards; or sloppy/corrupt procurement practices) are higher than the costs of openness.
When the UK Cabinet Office (under Blair) tried to get FOI shut down a couple of years after it came into effect, they commissioned 'independent' research (from a company run by a former Cabinet Secretary, if I recall correctly) on the costs of FOI. They estimated it cost £35m per annum (pdf). There was just one problem with waving this red rag in front of the media bull: it was desperately easy to compare it with the annual budget for the Central Office of Information (Whitehall's publicity and advertising agency), which was approximately 10 times larger.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
Making it more expensive would reduce its usage by Joe Public, not by journalists with a media organisation's credit card to back them up.
I wouldn't be so sure about that Mark. The evidence from Ireland, where the government massively increased the fees for making requests in 2003 - and appealing refusals - led to a significant decrease in requests from all sources. Here's a bit from a press release from the Irish Information Commissioner:
* overall usage of the Act has fallen by over 50% while requests for non-personal information has declined by 75%.
* the media are now less likely to use the Act. Usage by journalists declined steadily throughout 2003. Between the first quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2004 the number of requests fell by 83% and still continues to decline.
* other users of the Act, individuals and representative bodies, use the Act far less than before to access information on decisions that affect them directly or indirectly.
* business requests to all bodies declined by 28% over the two years and fell by 53% between the first quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2004.
With an NZ media that already operates largely on a 'churnalism' model of cutting and pasting press releases, or regurgitating what's been spun to them (aside from a few who do use the OIA intelligently), I'd be fairly cautious about Fairfax, APN or broadcast media organisations getting their credit cards out to pay for requests.
Conversely, the low fee regime currently prevaily in the UK has resulted in a lot of use. One blog has just published 366 examples of disclosures resulting from requests made via the 'What Do They Know' tool.
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Readers of this blog might also be interested in John Edwards' recent post on the BIMs.
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We should never give up.
Also, good post.
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And Parker gets Finance.
Quelle surprise.
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Pink vehicles on hills... this one's from 2006, on top of Mt Vic.
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Capture: City Scenes, in reply to Tom Ackroyd,
Hi Tom, same kind of car, but unlikely to be the same car as I took my photo in Cambridge (England) in July.
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...here's a flash car, in a city, from 2011.
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Capture: City Scenes, in reply to Jackie Clark,
I was just thinking that the brief you gave, Jackson, was to post our best shots of 2011.
Whoops! I missed that bit when I posted my city scenes last night. I'd figured that was the theme for this thread, not a review of the year. If it's the latter then...
