Open Government: From Crown Copyright to the Creative Commons and Culture Change

Abstract

Open government has long been advocated as an antidote to corruption and as an essential element in democracy. The concept of open government can be used in various contexts and has a variety of meanings. It is perhaps unwise to randomly 'Google' the phrase because that is likely to lead to infinite discussions about conspiracies and failure to release UFO files. In the legal and political science literature, openness and transparency are often discussed in relation to broad concepts of accountability and the responsiveness of governments to public participation in decision-making. Public participation in government may involve a range of levels of involvement from transparency (the supply of information to the public), or invitations to the public to supply information and be involved in consultation, through to full participation in the decision-making process with televoting. In this article I will focus my discussion upon access to documents that record government activity and a broader range of information created, collected, received, held or funded by government, which is referred to as public sector information.