From openness to sustainability

My daughter is studying psychology and explains all our actions with different theories. Something like that got started last week on the Open Knowledge Festival.

On Wednesday Ministry of Finance arranged an open "hackathon" (F) for developing a country plan in order to join Open Government Partnership along with 70 other countries.

Open government, Open knowledge, Open data.. 

Opening data has been on agenda for a year now. Short-sightedly, I have settled for aiming to opening up government spending.

Last week I came across with broader views that obviously had been there for me to find. With a colleague from Isle of Man we discussed how to find and visualize the influence behind faceless enterprises. How to spot the power links in the world economy and what exactly is the thing that needs to be opened if we aim to find the real places of influence?

Customer journeys in one's own mother tongue

Data visualization came up in Visualizing Knowledge (F) seminar on Monday. Rob Waller linked literacy built on structured documents with the concept of customer journey.

On Thursday I got a sort of a wake up call on the real significance of mother tongue. I got acquainted with contract visualization already on Monday, in English. But it wasn't until M!ND researcher Stefania Passera gave the same speech in Finnish, my own mother tongue, that really got my own thinking going.

As the pieces gained their familiarity in Finnish I became able to apply the newly learned methods in the phenomena in my own work.

So this is what it means to really understand what the official actually wants of me!

Open data is not knowledge, interpretation creates understanding

In the end we got taught by a living legend. Hans Rosling so knows how to visualize "boring" data, how to interpret it and how to communicate the phenomena lurking behind millions of rows of raw data. If Bush can get it, so can you, he concluded :)

Opening data, knowledge and government means more.
Openness is the way to sustainability.

Open data connects taxation with public spending

Knowledge is power, they say. In western countries we aim to control public decision making by making it transparent and opening it for discussion. The voters then have the power to change the decision makers they're unhappy with.

Doesn't the Arab Spring source from lack of that openness?

When we think of the complex causal connections within societies, it is obvious that the voting power is distributed unevenly. How do you care about something you don't understand?

Open data enables democracy

The recent development in ICT comes in handy. Open data makes, say, presenting government spending in a more conceivable way much easier than the dead-boring budget ledgers could ever achieve.

Apps4Finland is a competition that has really boosted innovation for a few years now. It has invited IT nerds to come up with stunning solutions of presenting data. But it is also advancing open government with invitations to open data.

My personal favorite is data visualization. Due to my background, here are a few examples that are closely related to taxation.

Taxes and other payments as a proportion of a working day

A day as an tax payer (F) describes with a watch, how your gross earnings would be divided into different payments. Click the watch for further information. Hovering the mouse above the watch takes you further in details.

First section of your earnings belongs to you, it is your net salary. Second section will cover your municipality tax and the third your state tax. The fourth sector is your share of pension fees and the fifth section will be spent on other minor fees.

Tax receipt shows how you finance the society

Tax receipt (F), on the other hand, shows you, based on your salary, how you will be financing public spending. The application is based on state budget and general information of tax percentages. Since the state budget is quite difficult with its bureaucratic wordings to apprehend, this is quite a nice way to get a hold of the bigger picture of government spending.

Yet another strong symbol of the Nordic openness and equality in Finland is that Tax Administration opens the so called public data on how individuals actually were taxed each year. Tax Administration publishes on its website information on
How the publication of data is carried out (F)
What is included in the public data (F)

Public data can be used to show how the tax laws apply to different tax payer groups. After the people have the information, they will be more able to analyze it and draw conclusions on their society, respectively. And we'll be one step closer to democracy.

Too big to fail?

Recent Fiscal Times introduced me with Pres. Reagan's former budget director David Stockman. This "enfant terrible" shocked in his time by admitting: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers’’.

Our public sector is now in the phase of building bigger and bigger entities of services. In doing so, I've come up with a similar thought.

Economy of scales may also carry a side effect. As things grow bigger, the number of those who can really understand what is going on grows smaller. Failures and misbehaviors do slip through, giving room to delusions of being too big to fail, so victorious nothing can harm us anymore.

In service chains covering the whole of society also their financies tend to complicate.

Open economy and eternal growth

In the times of regulation the economical ecosystem was (somewhat more) controllable. Now the whole world is an open economy, and a rapid growth or shift in consumption in one corner is bound to carry an effect somewhere else. Whoever tries to foresee the future developments judging by the numbers in recent history, truely needs to be quite a genious.

Stockman, like our ministry of finance a few years ago, Mr. Niinistö, calls for debt deflation, downsizing and a rise in national savings.

The principle is chrystal clear, let's just recall our studying years! If you gain 200 and have no assets to liquidate, 200 is what you can spend. After that, you are in the loan market. If you can prove a future revenue, you may discount that promise for a loan at the present. - I believe the whole world now knows, there is an end on that road of getting into debt..

Streamlining processes lowers expenditure

The Finnish way of cutting back public expenditure is to streamline processes. Up until now we've done that because of scarce human resources, a problem common to the aging western world, sometimes even for the benefit of our customer.

However, the next step must be unifying the common pools of data, gathering data only once at the source and sharing those data pools between government agencies. Some of that thinking you may read in my recent post.

The principle of open data (F) adds to transparency of government and optimizes the use of common data. Nowadays there are many government agencies whose funding is arranged solely on the revenues from distributing data. On government budgeting this means blurring image of the entity and complicated finances.

In practice, government agency A has budget means to buy data from B, also a government agency. B, however, is granted government funding for only part of its functions, so it needs to budget on revenue basis. This all results in a financial cobweb, sometimes impossible to audit trail.

In order to make things more reasonable and transparent, the core function of supplying the original data will be funded by the government. Distribution of that data between government agencies would become free of charge, or be done at cost pricing at the most.

We Finns do handle many areas already quite effectively. But I wonder how many brilliant solutions there are in many other areas, just waiting for us to find.

Disclaimer
These thoughts are mine and do not represent views of my employer, Finnish Tax Administration or the Finnish public sector, either.