Mit seinem Essay “Against Transparency” auf “The New Republic” hat Lawrence Lessig, der Gründer von Creative Commons, für Aufmerksamkeit und Verwirrung gesorgt. Nicht nur der Titel “Gegen Transparenz” hat bei einigen Opengovernment und Transparenz -Enthusiasten für Verstimmung gesorgt. Dabei ist es keineswegs so, das sich Lessig gegen bestehende Transparenzprojekte wie die der Sunlight Foundation ausspricht. Vielmehr unterstreicht Lessig, dass Transparenz Projekte zu kurz greifen, wenn sie bei der Forderung nach dem freien Zugang zu Daten aus Politik und Verwaltung stehen bleibt. Lessig betont das unser politisches System so tief von Korruption und Lobbyismus durchdrungen ist, dass der freie Zugang zu Daten und Informationen nicht ausreicht. Vielmehr müsste eine Transparenz Bewegung das gesamte korrupte System der Wahlkampffinanzierung und des Lobbyismus angreifen. In diesem Videointerview bringt Lessig seine Aussage auf den Punkt.
Siehe dazu auch den Artikel auf Internet.artizans: Beyond Transparency: from Lessig to True Levellers und den Artikel von Paul Blumenthal für die Sunlight Foundation: In Response
In case you missed it, Larry Lessig wrote a long article in The New Republic titled “Against Transparency.” Sunlight Foundation co-founders Ellen Miller and Mike Klein have a response in the online edition that you can find here. Here’s a quick piece of that:
The current transparency movement actually is quite different from the “naked transparency” straw man Lessig creates and attacks in his essay. We do not believe in solely releasing data and then reaping the whirlwind. We and our colleagues spend most of our efforts creating tools and sites to help draw meaning from the information we help put online. For example, we annually directly train more than a thousand reporters and bloggers on how to use these datasets, tools, and sites to better inform their investigations into the work of government. Untold others find and use these resources on their own. Our flagship sites are packed with detailed narrative postings seeking to help connect the dots; the mashups we have fostered aim at making meaning from minutia. The very idea of exposing government data feeds for outside developers is, at its core, about spurring innovation in the way we all perceive and contextualize data.
Others have made counter-arguments to Lessig’s article including David Weinberger:
[T]ransparency is not about publishing every fact, but about making transparency a prima facie good: In a transparent regime, agencies need no special justification to make something public, but do to keep something secret. Without this change in defaults, the decisions about what to make public are in the hands of those with the strongest incentive to keep the citizenry in the dark.
And Carl Malamud:
Larry Lessig had a dream. In this dream, he was standing on K Street, preaching in the dark. Suddenly, a naked posse on Segways went whizzing by, shining their flashlights in people’s faces. Bystanders were all blinded by these random lights and lost their night vision. When Larry turned around, the naked posse was racing towards the White House for an open government rally, trailed by a screaming mob of marijuana-smoking birthers.
Mittlerweile ist eine hitzige Debatte um den Essay von Lessig entstanden. Hier einige der Debattenbeiträge in der Übersicht:
- TNR Debate: More Transparency Actually Makes Politicians Less Accountable
- Article – Tim Wu – 10/11/2009
- TNR Debate: Too Much Transparency? (Part II)
- Article – Ellen Miller,Michael Klein – 10/11/2009
- TNR Debate: Too Much Transparency? (Part IV)
- Article – David Weinberger – 10/13/2009
- TNR Debate: Courts Present Our Best Hope for Government Accountability
- Article – Jeffrey Rosen – 10/13/2009
- TNR Debate: Why Transparency Isn’t Dangerous to Democracy
- Article – Floyd Abrams – 10/16/2009
- TNR Debate: Lets His Transparency Critics Have It
- Article – Lawrence Lessig – 10/19/2009
I had hoped my essay, “Against Transparency,” might have inspired something of a marriage between the transparency movement and campaign finance reform. To that end, I had offered something old and something new, something borrowed, and, as is my style, something blue. But like high school all over again, I have obviously fumbled on the first date. Let’s work this backwards.
Related posts:
- Open Government: A Conversation with Ellen Miller
- Gov 2.0 Summit: Ellen Miller und Vivek Kundra
- Sunlight Interview
No related posts.