Professor Samuelson will principally be responsible for teaching the second half of the course which will focus on information policy issues with which information managers need to be familiar. This document is Professor Samuelson's overview of the themes we will be exploring during the second half of the term.
Information policy is like a gate that regulates the flow of information.
In many situations, it establishes an open gate in response to a perceived public interest in allowing information to flow as freely as possible. Yet it also closes the gate sometimes because there are also many respects in which the public interest is best served by restricting the flow of information. In many policy domains, these two contradictory attitudes are in tension, and policymakers must decide which will override the other and to what degree. A common way to resolve this tension is through adoption of balancing principles. Allowing information to flow freely is, among other things, an enabler of democratic discourse.