The Theater of Algorithmic Transparency in the French Public Sector

• In Event: The Social Life of Algorithms - II

Abstract

Transparency is not solely a pure ideal and horizon of the way liberal-democracies conceived information politics (Schudson, 2015). This concept is more insidiously a powerful device setting a particular theater where information is contingently delivered and negotiated through editorial formats such as FOIA letters, reports, data visualizations, websites, simulators or source code repositories. The possibilities of scrutinizing algorithms in the public sector is strongly order by the particular practices and scenes of (in)contestability these formats will permit. This talk will present the results of an eight months ethnography conducted in France where a new law is regulating algorithms used by public services.

Many french public bodies are now obliged to follow three obligations put in application in the Code of Relations between the Public and The Administrations : an explicit reference to the use of an algorithm needs to appear on key documents used by public services, a general information on what are the main algorithmic treatments used by a public organisation needs to be published, a new individual’s right allow citizens to request how an algorithmic system have been used in an administrative decision-making process.

How by responding to these three obligations - materialized in editorial formats - public organizations can potentially distribute capacities of seeing and witnessing (Rancière, 1995. 2000. 2016) ? How the formats create forms of visibility and impression management (Goffman, 1959. Flyverbom, 2016) and how in doing so they will set opportunities and constraints for future action organized by citizens (Anderson & Kreiss, 2013) ?

Author

• Loup Cellard, University of Warwick