Public should have access to its data

A government of the people, by the people, for the people cannot flourish in the shadows. For democracy to thrive for the long term, members of the public must engage in civic and community affairs, and government agencies and officials must be transparent in and accountable for their actions.

The Open Data Initiative, a worldwide movement that includes cities, states and nations, recognizes this fact and promotes easier access to public data online as a way to empower citizens, spur government efficiency and innovation and nurture public-private partnerships that serve the needs of taxpayers.

The basic idea is that public information should be broadly accessible online, in a standard format easily read by a human being or a computer. The goal is to help individual citizens and government agencies alike access and share information so that they can develop well-informed opinions and make the best decisions about policies and programs funded by taxpayers. Another benefit: the opportunity to "crowd source" innovative solutions to intractable problems and to galvanize positive social change.

The state officially endorsed this ideal in July, when Gov. Neil Abercrombie signed Act 263 into law; the state government’s open data portal can be found at https://data. hawaii.gov, with a variety of data sets that users can export into spreadsheets, sort, search and analyze. The 9,005 data sets currently available run the gamut from a list of pesticides licensed for use in Hawaii to campaign contributions recorded by politicians to a map of hurricane shelters at schools across the state.

Now the Honolulu City Council has followed suit, unanimously passing Bill 53 last week, which is modeled on the state law. Mayor Kirk Caldwell has said he will sign the measure into law, a pledge we strongly support.

The city already has an open data portal, at https://data.honolulu.gov, and the bill will codify a formal policy of what data should be released and how, said Chief Information Officer Mark Wong, who noted that such a policy will take time to develop and implement. Once the bill becomes law, Wong has 180 days to announce and publish the date of a public hearing on the matter.

The government’s stated commitment to free-flowing public information is laudable. We hope and expect that the state and soon the city will persevere through the hard work it will take to transform this visionary concept into concrete action. It will be up to government employees to bring the ideal to life as part of their everyday work, treating information-seekers not as irritants to be dissuaded but stakeholders to be engaged.

Of course, adoption also will mean that the city must commit to updating its technological infrastructure, a costly endeavor that should pay off in the long run, in the form of more efficient government operations that will benefit from the increased oversight broad public disclosure is sure to bring.

One of the core principles of the open-data movement is that government data should be presumed to be public, unless a law specifically states otherwise. Highlighting the importance of transparency among government employees, policymakers and elected officials is especially important in Hawaii, where secrecy imposed by labor-union contracts and other privacy edicts too often rules the day. This tendency toward nondisclosure seeps into broad areas of public policy and represents a bureaucratic mentality that simply must change in the Information Age.

This initiative bolsters the bedrock democratic ideals on which this country stands. We look forward to its full adoption by the city.