Open data: a blueprint for reforming governments

The `brain` is the government. This is from  Nesta, the independent charity, set up by the Cabinet Office which advises governments around the world. [I know. What a nerve !]

"First, data – scraping, mining, and matching. Over one million public datasets are now open; more than 60 governments are part of the Open Government Partnership, and governments are becoming rather more like Richard Rogers buildings with the internal workings made visible. [Made visible to who?] This changing approach to data has big implications for how centres of government are organised..."

"The UK is experimenting with a network of What Works Centres, building on the success of NICE in healthcare, [NICE is a success for who? ] and supported by the Alliance for Useful Evidence (hosted in Nesta)."
 
"These centres are encouraging departments and agencies to make more use of formal experiments and trials, [That includes children] leaving behind better evidence for those who come after them..."

"If the late 20th century centre of government was dominated by the spin–doctors working through fairly small numbers of newspapers and broadcasters, the future centre may be dominated by networked communicators influencing the blogosphere, Twitter and their successors..." [Networked communicators ? We have been warned.]

"This requires a major shift in culture and style – to becoming more open, committed to fast learning, less pretending to omniscience." [Less grandiose ideas like the government pretending to take care of  wellbeing from preconception onwards, perhaps ?]

It doesn’t necessarily need to be big – the low hundreds rather than thousands are suitable for a medium to large nation state. But it does need to be highly skilled; highly networked; and well integrated. [That is the Scottish model of government; i.e. the joined up approach.]

https://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/rewiringthebrain.pdf

Here`s a bit of a paradox given the call for open data:

The GoTo index uses peer review to rank the world’s leading think tanks, some 6,846 of them, `with the help of a panel of over 1,900 institutions and experts from the print and electronic media, academia, public and private donor institutions, and governments around the world`. However, the index shows that defining what constitutes a think tank remains difficult. Chatham House topped the list.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/02/20/think-tanks-can-transform-into-the-standard-setters-and-arbiters-of-quality-of-21st-century-policy-analysis/

Chatham House the transparent think tank that does not take minutes at its meetings or allow `who said what` to be made public. Nearly two thousand institutions and experts rank this number one !

I don`t think we can trust any of them and that includes Nesta.