Opinion: Transparency also good for businesses

Thirty-odd years ago, a champion of government transparency was lectured by a legislator who insisted that no one really cared what the government did behind closed doors, other than a special-interest group known as the press.

The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government was founded in the wake of that disconcerting episode. We’ve come a long way since then.

Today there’s widespread recognition — including among legislators — that government transparency isn’t just for newshounds. Nor is its natural constituency confined to lawyers, gadflies, and other assorted troublemakers. It turns out that conducting the public’s business in public has benefits not only for advocates, activists, and agitators, and not only for the public bodies whose operations are strengthened by public scrutiny.

It’s good for business, too.

We live in an information age, and information is nearly as essential an ingredient of production as are labor, capital, and raw materials. Business has a vital interest, for example, in learning what’s afoot in the Legislature, and what the regulatory state has been up to lately.

It’s no accident that the most open societies tend to be the most prosperous. Transparency spurs private investment by breeding confidence in the stability of government and in the fairness of its processes. An open government is a leading indicator of an environment in which business can flourish.

But that’s not all. Government not only makes decisions; it gathers and generates and synthesizes data, big and small. Unleashing the power of that data by shaking it loose for public use — at no or minimal cost to the public that paid to compile it in the first place — is one of the most important projects of contemporary open-government initiatives.

The stakes are high, and not just for the individual entrepreneurs who seek to exploit government-harvested information for their own financial benefit. Whole industries have been built on the basis of data that government has had the good sense to treat as a public commodity.

Weather observations collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) furnish a classic example. The NOAA’s open-data ethos has been credited with supplying some $700 million of value added annually to private weather services.

Secrecy has the potential to corrupt any institution, public or private. That’s why the law gives shareholders and members the right to inspect a corporation’s books and records. And that’s why, even when the law doesn’t require it, businesses should consider whether openness is the better policy.

To be sure, there are limits to transparency in business. The duty of openness is owed to the entity’s owners, rather than the world at large. And while government should keep few secrets from its constituents, businesses have good reasons for keeping their competitors in the dark.

But the fact remains that collaboration on the basis of shared information is an engine of economic development and a boon to sound decision-making. Democracy — and the transparency that makes it possible — isn’t just for government anymore.

— Kip Purcell

New Mexico Foundation for Open Government former president