This is something of a thought experiment that's been running around my head for a few days. A few drivers for it have been the tweets about media literacy and some of the blog posts underpinning that discussion and the World of Warcraft plague thread.

Data is information

A central question in my research is "what do people think publishing (open*) data about democracy does, and what does it actually do?". It's a hard question to definitively answer, firstly because intentions are by their nature quite slippery. What is intended each day might change, the answer is not set permanently and is often reactive and iterative to the world. Sometimes the answer might be some variation on "because democracy" or "because it is data that just should be available". But the funding models of data startups do not allow either of those reasons as the core driver of a business case or a grant application.

This information is imbued with politics. A thread that runs through national discourses states that, broadly, you shouldn't be allowed to participate in democracy if you aren't informed enough. A lot of heavy lifting in that idea and I want to be careful not to create too much of a straw man here, but even so: the obvious questions of "who decides what 'informed' means" ring out, as well as how this set of ideas was once deployed against suffragists.

Literacy could come from inclusion

The rebuke I sometimes come to in my own head considering my opinions on policy is "sure, but you'd have to kill a hell of a lot of people for that to happen with no compromises or amendments". Our version of truth or "good politics" is not universal. We all disagree. The idea

Which means destabilising things

The game around information involves a judgement about the trustworthiness of the information issuing authority.

What is use in this case?

A game; an anti-problem.

Anyone who has ever had a meeting where Mark Dalagarno is helping to pick apart a problem will recognise this. The task is to imagine you were designing a system to create the problem you're trying to fix. What would you do? In this case, we should imagine that we are trying to create a system that allows as few people as possible to u

Imagine for a moment that all the infrastructure level democracy data on the internet is untrustworthy. If you couldn't trust institutional, third sector, NGO, government or civic tech data. How would that look? What types of