Traversing digital Babel : information, e-government, and exchange

292 Pages·2014·8.727 MB·English

by  Peled, Alon

Traversing Digital Babel
Information Policy Series
Edited by Sandra Braman and Paul Jaeger
The Information Policy Series publishes research on and analysis of significant prob-
lems in the field of information policy, including decisions and practices that enable
or constrain information, communication, and culture irrespective of the legal siloes
in which they have traditionally been located as well as state-law-society interactions.
Defining information policy as all laws, regulations, and decision-making principles
that affect any form of information creation, processing, flows, and use, the series
includes attention to the formal decisions, decision-making processes, and entities
of government; the formal and informal decisions, decision-making processes, and
entities of private and public sector agents capable of constitutive effects on the
nature of society; and the cultural habits and predispositions of governmentality that
support and sustain government and governance. The parametric functions of infor-
mation policy at the boundaries of social, informational, and technological systems
are of global importance because they provide the context for all communications,
interactions, and social processes.

Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis , Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova
Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange , Alon Peled
Traversing Digital Babel
Information, E-Government, and Exchange
Alon Peled
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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This book was set in Stone Sans Std and Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia
Limited, Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peled, Alon, 1962–
Traversing digital Babel : information, e-government, and exchange / Alon Peled.
pages cm. — (Information policy series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-02787-8
1. Government information. 2. Electronic government information.
3. Interagency coordination. 4. Intergovernmental cooperation. 5. Government
information– Economic aspects. 6. Information policy. I. Title.
ZA5049.P45 2014
025.04— dc23
2014003836

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my children
Anat, Eytan, Shira, and Matan
You light up my life
with love and joy

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Series Editor’ s Introduction xi
Introduction: The Archaeological and Electronic Mountains 1
1 The Information Sharing Crisis that Does Not Go Away 13
2 Coerce, Consent, and Coax: Existing Information Sharing
Approaches 39
3 Why Open Data Finds Agencies’ Doors Closed 57
4 How Data Trade Opens Agencies’ Closed Doors 75
5 Public Sector Data as a Contested Commodity 105
6 The Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE) 125
7 Four PSIE Challenges 161
8 A Political Strategy to Promote PSIE 179
Appendix: Abbreviations 193
Notes 199
References 201
Index 249

Acknowledgments
Between 1998 and 2001, I lived next to Tel Gezer, a man-made mountain
in central Israel, where twenty-eight civilizations are buried one beneath
the other. Inspired by Gezer, I published an article comparing it to the
computer system of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This amusing
comparison was well received but I quickly became disappointed with my
own work. I believe that a social scientist must not only explain the world
but also try to improve it a little. My article did not do this— it suggested
that government computers are too complex to share information. I spent
the next decade thinking about how to convince government officials to
improve such sharing. Consequently, this book explains why government
officials fail to share information, and also proposes a new path to resolving
this problem.
The Israel Science Foundation and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
supported this research. I am grateful to Professor Sandra Braman who
nudged me to pursue wiser intellectual directions. I am indebted to Stu-
art Robbins whose wise comments guided me to improve the final version
of the book. I am grateful to Michael Ziv Kenet, Jessica Genauer, Adam
Hoffman, Alexander Troitsky, and Ofer Pogorelsky, my research assistants,
whose help was invaluable. My parents, Arye and Sylvia, and my brother,
Amir, provided me with unconditional love and support. My wife, Alisa,
inspires me daily with her devotion to her students. Our four children,
Anat, Eytan, Shira, and Matan, are the reason that I get up every morning
and go to sleep every night with a smile on my face.

Alon Peled, Jerusalem, 2014