Paper short abstract:

By considering state law, municipal policy, third-party contracts and data formats through a critical lens, I explore ways that municipal government data is no less by and for commercial actors as it is the public. I argue that commercial actors are often written out of open data discourse.

Paper long abstract:

In response to rising calls for transparency, municipal governments increasingly make datasets available online. Users of this data are primarily envisioned within the city as community advocates. In Seattle, Washington, the state's Public Records Act designates data used within government as by and for the public; the law creates a strong mandate for open data initiatives, insofar as data records are thought to always already belong to the public. Beyond Seattle, the wider discourse of open data valorizes democratic uses and users. However, municipal open data is part of a larger collective of commercial actors that are involved at every step of government data collection, management, and use. For example, the Seattle Department of Transportation contracts a private company to create and maintain sensors that collect resident location trace data. Contracts like these do not prevent contractors from selling the data they collect. Other companies commercialize open government data as their core business. By considering state law, municipal policy, third-party contracts and data formats through a critical lens, I explore ways that municipal government data is no less by and for commercial actors as it is the public. I argue that commercial actors are often written out of open data discourse, and point to examples from my fieldwork for where and how they should be written back into a Critical Data Studies narrative. This work is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the City of Seattle and relevant activist groups between 2014-2016.