Recently, Honolulu’s local news venture Civil Beat released a database of State Employee Salaries. While I appreciate and applaud this effort, the database is behind a paywall and the source PDFs are not downloadable (download has been disabled). In fact, the source data is not downloadable in any form, as far as I can tell. No CSV, JSON, or XML. Nothing. Essentially, what Civil Beat has done is to take publicly available data obtained via FOIA (at the state’s expense) and make it profitable through availability. Now, I’m not opposed to this sort of capitalism, I’m simply not used to it in the context of “transparency”. In my brainwashed mind, Transparency data is Free, Open and Available to the public at large (to be downloaded, examined, visualized, etc.).
In the world of Civil Beat, they need to make money by selling memberships. Providing access to heretofore publicly unavailable data is definitely a potent and potential revenue stream. But, isn’t this just Capitalism in Transparency clothing? This isn’t capital “T” transparency, it’s a service.
Technically, my beef shouldn’t be with Civil Beat. They are just playing a well-worn and profitable game with publicly available data. In a perfect “transparent” reality, the government of Hawaii should be making this data available to anyone and everyone sans FOIA. Moreover, now that the data has been made available to Civil Beat, it should be released online for any and all to access. Why should Civil Beat get to maintain a monopoly on the data? It is public data, after all.
In the absence of a responsive and open local government that follows the 8 Principles of Open Data, I’d like to challenge Civil Beat to do the right thing and release the original public data in whatever format it was received.
I hate to pick on Civil Beat, but they are proving to be an interesting case study. After I chimed in regarding the lack of public access to the data, they actually ADDED a giant watermark to the NON-DOWNLOADABLE embedded PDF of the document they received as a result of their FOIA for the Hawaii state salaries. What?! Why bother even providing the non-downloadable “embedded” PDF in the first place.
I found this reply tweet from @Civilbeat to @Hawaii rather telling “It’s def public data. Moved watermark. Okay to promo CB after all time/effort it took to get the data, no? We should write about it.”
So, they’ve watermarked an undownloadable PDF of public data to guarantee that they get credit for their copy of a public document they obtained via FOIA.
I’m sorry, but a FOIA request is simply that, a request for information from a public agency. Most of the time it’s just a letter! I could file one myself for the exact same data. Anyone can. Of course, building a searchable database of OCR or hand-keyed data from a PDF is the time consuming bit. I could do it, but there’s the rub - there’s really no incentive, financial or otherwise.
So what exactly is Civil Beat so afraid of? They’ve already built a searchable database of the data. Are they really concerned that releasing the 334 page PDF will somehow negatively impact their bottom line or the work they’ve done? Will they somehow lose credit for all their efforts? Unlikely.
Once again, their value add in this situation is the searchable database. Releasing the original source PDF (unwatermarked AND downloadable) poses very little threat to Civil Beat, and yet they appear to be unwilling to simply open up and set it free.
Why not report on the data AND give the data away? What do they have to lose?
***UPDATE*** Well, the conversation was started over at Ryan Ozawa’s blog and it has turned into quite an interesting adventure