31 August 2004

Information Sharing in a Digital World

Part Two: The shape of information rights to come: democracy's best tool?

By Thomas B Riley, Executive Director and Chair, Commonwealth Centre for Electronic Governance

There are currently billions of pages out on the world wide web. The world is at the fingertips of the citizen, but the challenge is actually finding what is out there, accessing the vast amounts of information, both on government web sites and in departmental data bases, and analysing what is or is not useful to the user.

The government of Canada is working to find ways to merge their databases to enable the citizen to take advantage of information stored by government. There are many technical problems being faced. This attempt to find ways to provide more information to the citizen reflects the desire to respond to a growing information-aware society. Information is not only a piece of barter for the business world to use for competitive and commercial value. Information is now a precious commodity for the citizen.

In these new online environments, citizens are increasingly demanding more privacy rights to protect their personal information. However, there is also a contradiction here as, at the moment, citizens are sharing and using personal and aggregate information more than ever before. But in a cyberspace environment, the citizen is becoming more sophisticated in understanding the impact that information can have on one's life. The individual wants to ensure that one's own personal information is not abused. The individual wants the ability to control his/her personal information environment in cyberspace. At the same time, the individual wants unfettered access to all manner of information. But the sheer amount of information available, the ability to communicate information, and the value that individuals put on information, is bringing a new understanding of the nature of information itself.

The Information Age appears to be bringing more demands for accountability and in the years to come, the public will come to expect this more and more.

Thus, on the side of freedom of information, the public is starting to demand more information for all facets of their lives. We see more data on labels of commercial products; shareholders demand more information about the activities of the companies in which they are investing (not just the usual "hyped" good news about the company's activities in the past year). The Information Age appears to be bringing more demands for accountability and in the years to come, the public will come to expect this more and more.

The Internet is an open network, which is contributing to the development of open environments. This idea is spreading into society as a whole, resulting in expectation of more accountability from all our public and private sector organisations. However, the downside of this equation is that we are experiencing information overload. This is why information and knowledge management have become so important - they are tools to guide us to develop methodologies we can use to make full use of the information available.

This plethora of information has led to the next wave of information rights that has begun to grow in the private sector, as government, the courts, public interest groups and citizens demand accountability and transparency. As the average citizen becomes armed with more knowledge (or at least has the capacity to be armed with knowledge), then it will be private sector organizations, along with governments, who will be pressed upon to become more forthcoming about the information held in their organisations. Just as privacy moved into the domain of the public sector thirty years ago, when Sweden passed the first data protection law in the world, so will the right of access to information become a part of the private sector domain. We have seen the results of private sector accountability after the dot.com bust, followed by revelations of financial malfeasance by large corporations. We have seen senior corporate officials taken in handcuffs into court and charged with various financial crimes. A decade ago this did not seem likely but this era of Accountability and Transparency has made such a spectacle inevitable.

Information Rights will become a part of civil society's infrastructure.

Individuals' rights developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and have resulted in human rights laws and other mechanisms, such as freedom of information and privacy laws, to protect the individual from potential abuses and infringement of public sector agencies. One may predict that this trend will continue, as the recognition dawns that it is also aggregate rights that strengthen the citizenry as a whole. As the idea flourishes, demands for information on a more sophisticated level will grow. Information Rights will become a part of civil society's infrastructure. As the knowledge economy grows, and the knowledge professional comes to be seen as a continuing, powerful force in our society, so will the demands for wider swathes of information grow, in particular, from governments.

In an information-intensive society, citizens might want more from both governments and the private sector. This issue is central to the evolution of e-government and e-governance issues. The citizen is an integral part of the equation as government go more and more online and seek to develop comprehensive policies to enact e-services and other e-programs.

National governments that seek to engage their citizenry in the process of government may do so in many ways, such as:

	·	making more information available online from government to ensure there is an informed citizenry;
	·	providing web sites that seek input from people on all manner of government programs and issues;
	·	developing listservs and discussion groups on important national issues and other means to engage the citizenry;
	·	providing grants to organizations seeking online democratic activities, including the search for information;
	·	developing local community projects that embrace all levels of society from the academic world, to businesses, large and small, to non-profit and volunteer organizations; this can encompass governments in developed countries;
	·	developing web sites that allow citizens easy access, that are interactive, and that meet the needs of the community;
	·	ensuring information on web sites is easily attainable, in a form understood by the citizen and can easily be downloaded;
	·	providing search engines and hot links to ensure the citizen gets what he or she wants in the right format from the right agency;
	·	in developed countries where access to the Internet is limited to smaller sections of the population, working to develop information policies that encompass all the citizens in the countries;
	·	developing programs to teach local leaders in the communities to become information facilitators.

The Internet is a medium that has allowed people to involve themselves in the democratic process in new and unique ways. Governments at all levels and international organizations will increasingly be impacted by these changes. Thus, there is a need for awareness building within governments and international organizations of the changes that are occurring. This can be accomplished through educational and training programs. It will be necessary for governments and international organizations to shed their proprietary attitudes towards the information they hold. Of course, all of these recommendations depend on government providing sufficient human and financial resources to accomplish them.

For fuller details on this concept of information sharing please go to the latest paper from Riley Information Services Inc., E-Government: The Digital Divide and Information Sharing: Examining the Issues at: http://www.rileyis.com/publications/research_papers/track04/index.htm

Other articles by Thomas Riley:
- Information Sharing in a Digital World - Part 1: Information as a Democratic Tool
- The Digital Divide in the Developed World
- E-Democracy and the Resurgence of Democracy
- eGovernance to eDemocracy: Examining the Evolution
- Security Laws and Privacy: Striking the Balance [Part 2]
- Security Laws and Privacy: Striking the Balance [Part 1]
- An Overview of the Knowledge Economy
- eDemocracy: An Evolution in Progress
- Definining E-Government and E-Governance: Staying the Course
- The Role of Information in eGovernment Implementation
- Change Management and the Relationship to eGovernment
- Privacy Trends: Meeting New Demands
- eDemocracy in a Changing World

Thomas Riley is the co-Founder, Chair of the Board and Chief Executive of the Commonwealth Centre for Electronic Governance, a think-tank set up under a Commonwealth Secretariat programme in London. He is also the President of Riley Information Services, a consultant and advisor specialising in national and international IT policy development, and a Visiting Professor of Law and Technology at the University of Glasgow. For further information he can be contacted at rtriley6@cs.com