Developing geographic information infrastructures for local government: the role of trust

Trust in Geographic Information Infrastructures A key notion underpinning spatial data infrastructure (SDI) initiatives in a federal model is that the local government agencies of counties and municipalities will share their geographic information freely with government agencies of regions, states and federal agencies operating at the national level. In a phenomenon known widely as vertical integration (Burgess 1999), the detailed information collected by local agencies should be available to agencies operating at other levels of government, ensuring the most complete geographic information possible. This is especially true of the United States's National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), one of the oldest SDI programs (US President 1994), which differs substantially from many other SDI initiatives--e.g., the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure and the Global SDI--in this regard. While the NSDI has been successful among US federal agencies in improving geographic information (GI) sharing and collaboration (FGDC 1997; Sperry 2000), there is little information about its impact or success at the local level. Although other SDI activities around the world may vary in substantial ways from those in the NSDI, many concepts of these initiatives draw on the NSDI proposal. While the findings I report here strictly apply only to the US, they hold important examples for SDI activities around the world at all levels. This article takes up the issue of local government involvement in the NSDI by asking a question: why should local governments involve themselves in the NSDI? While the focus on issues of trust probes a facet of interagency relationships that is normally relegated to political scientists, it is complementary to literature addressing technological barriers (Goodchild et al. 1998) or organizational sociological defilades (Masser 1999; Nedovic-Budic and Pinto 2000), and it contributes valuable insights on the political dimensions of developing SDI and on the necessity of furnishing financial issues that provide incentives for local elected officials struggling with many budgetary issues, among them geographic information. Given the importance of budgetary considerations, why should trust be significant in examining local government GI activities? As a wide range of philosophers, political scientists and sociologists indicate (Luhmann 1979; Giddens 1990; Warren 1999), trust is a key issue in governance. A definition of "trust" in this literature can be summarized as: Trust is an indicator of people's willingness to place faith in relationships and institutions in which they have limited influence. While we commonly focus on trust as an important issue in citizen/government relationships, it is also fundamental to the operation of government. This is apparent in smaller bureaucracies, in which the ability to 'bend the rules' is much more commonplace than in large bureaucracies with strongly entrenched administrative procedures. Local government agency activities experience an inherently closer coupling with political representatives and with different agencies in both intramunicipal and intermunicipal activities. Building a SDI is fundamentally an interagency act, and thus a matter of trust. Trust is also relevant in the following fundamental way. The NSDI is a concept in the US for sharing and coordinating GI. In other words, getting the money to build the NSDI is just one part of the project. The involved parties first have to agree to the architect's design. People do more than follow the technology and act as users--they want to be builders and participants. Financial solutions help promote trust, but developing trust begins with involvement. The concept of the NSDI presupposes local government participation, but local-level activities up to now have been limited. In addressing these issues, we also need to consider that the NSDI is largely invisible for local government officials because it has yet to exist in any relevant form. …