You can’t API your way out of politics

Alex Blandford, Public Digital consultant by day, Oxford anthropologist by night – offered a different kind of data: the kind you gather over pints and dinners. His research into civic technologists paints them as “radicalised nerds” trying to fix broken systems – the kind of people behind mySociety and Full Fact, who have both presented recently).

Alex presented a diagram of the knowledge ‘stack’ (working from ‘data’ at the bottom, through ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ to ‘wisdom’ at the top) applied to civic tech, and argued that we need an argumentation layer.

Creating open data alone won’t change politics, he argued. We need to recognise that open data, civic tech, open government and digital government are all political positions. His message was clear: open data is political, and if we want to change things, we have to get political too. You can read more about it here.