If you’re in the D.C. area, come join the fun next Monday, November 15th, as the Advisory Committee on Transparency kicks off with its first event: The Future of Earmark Transparency (2:00 p.m., 2203 Rayburn House Office Building).

The Sunlight Foundation’s Daniel Schuman moderates a discussion that includes Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense and yours truly. My WashingtonWatch.com project crowdsourced over 40,000 earmark requests last year, which we displayed on this map.

Earmarks are a hot topic right now. The new Republican Congress may make a move to ban them, but the Senate leadership may not be ready to go quite that far.

Will full-fledged earmark transparency be the compromise? It might provide a model for far more transparent processes throughout Congress.

Greg Elin (@gregelin) of the Sunlight Foundation schools you on government trasparency in under 5 minutes:

I previously lauded the Sunlight Foundation for its intention to bid on the contract for updating Recovery.gov. There’s been extensive excessive discussion of it on the Open House Project Google group.

The general theme among the one or two critics has been “leave the incompetence to the experts.” They’ve been a bit curmedgeonly, frankly.

But an informative and balanced comment highlights the practice of “wiring” government contracts. The contracting authority gets together with the preferred contractor and they collaborate to make it very difficult for anyone else to win the bid.

Well, that’s why Sunlight’s bid is so interesting and different. As I said, “[T]he contract award will now be subject to public scrutiny. Value-for-dollar to the taxpayer will be easily discernible, and that will raise the political risk if the contract is awarded based on cronyism or go-with-whatchya-knowism.”

Government contracting officials aren’t used to encountering public scrutiny and political risk for their award decisions. They’re going to experience it here, and they should get used to it for the long haul. I am eager – nay, giddy! – to report on what happens.

Kudos, and carry on, Sunlight.

. . . is for the group being convened by the Sunlight Foundation to do it. Pitch in if you can. Pass the word.

I think Sunlight stands a pretty good chance, simply because the contract award will now be subject to public scrutiny. Value-for-dollar to the taxpayer will be easily discernible, and that will raise the political risk if the contract is awarded based on cronyism or go-with-whatchya-knowism.

Kudos to Sunlight for taking this bold and fun step!

Here’s Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation on the closed process being used to ram through the deficit-spending/economic stimulus bill:

[I]t is not just Republicans who are being denied access to the bill. Reporters, bloggers, and the general public are being denied an opportunity to review one of the most important pieces of legislation sent through Congress in a long time. Anyone who wants should express that, whatever the partisan reasons for denying access to the bill, the American people deserve a right to review this legislation. Slamming it through without letting anyone see, save for 7 or 8 congressmen and some staff, is not fair to the public or the legislative process. This is a dangerous practice that the Democrats ran against in 2006 and now, in the majority, are unfortunately using to block their opposition’s attacks. The majority Democrats should maintain their previous position on running the most open and honest government by allowing the public to review this legislation. Anything less is unacceptable.

On this week’s show, we discuss government transparency—a topic a number of us here at the TLF have written about lately.  Among other things, we discuss:

• Why transparency is important
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• What data the government should provide and how
• Good and bad examples of transparency
• President Obama’s promise to have the most accountable administration in history
• Obama’s plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer

My guests for this show are:

• TLFer Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Institute, who’s written extensively about transparency and has recently launched an e-Government project called StimulusWatch
• TLFer Jim Harper of the Cato Institute and WashingtonWatch.com, another very successful e-Government project, who’s asked some tough questions about the Administration’s implementation of e-Government thus far and led a great Cato policy forum on this issue (featuring Jerry, among others)
• John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation, the leading e-Government non-profit whose “non-partisan mission [is to use] the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens”

You can subscribe to our podcast here or through iTunes here.  Or, you can play or download this podcast using the online player below.

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. . . a Senior Program Coordinator.

My post yesterday wondering aloud whether the Obama administration was walking away from its transparency commitments was slightly premature. Memoranda were being issued/reported on as I wrote, and this morning’s Washington Post describes some of the technical glitches that befuddled White House staff on day one. The texts of the executive orders President Obama signed yesterday are now online, but his memoranda on transparency aren’t yet. Helpfully, they’ve been posted by the Sunlight Foundation.

But I think my post was sound in the main, because I was looking for actual pro-transparency deeds from the new administration, and they haven’t materialized. I appreciate the sentiments voiced in these documents, but don’t find myself wholly impressed with the actual transparency measures the White House has taken.

What I’m hearing is the transparency dog that didn’t bark: The Obama team set a great precedent in the transition with the Seat at the Table program, but there’s no sign that such a thing will be implemented in the White House. Why not?

We can expect an “Open Government Directive” within 120 days and new guidelines for the Freedom of Information Act, but I would have appreciated seeing President Obama’s commitment to openness illustrated the best way possible: through the direct and immediate commitment of his own White House operation.

The White House will not be run as openly as the transition was. The agencies, already predisposed against transparency, will see this as a sign of weak commitment and will whittle away even more fiercely at the good sentiments President Obama’s expressed in his transparency memoranda.

(“Thanks for inviting me!” said the skunk at the garden party.)

(Before you finish reading this, if you’re in D.C., you’ll want to sign up for this policy forum.)

Ben Goddard’s most recent column in The Hill is called “Obama Marketing Lesson,” and he reviews how the Internet and savvy use of media energized President-Elect Obama’s campaign effort. “[S]ocial networks have returned as one of the most powerful forces in politics,” he says.

President-elect Obama has a database of some 10 million names and e-mail addresses, and those who built it have made clear they’ll activate that army to support the new president. MoveOn.org is already preparing its supporters to advocate for progressive policies. Groups like Divided We Fail, Healthcare for America Now! and the American Medical Association are already running television and online campaigns to advocate for healthcare reform.

(Goddard will be lending some of his insights about communications strategies to secure the country against fear and overreaction at our January conference on counterterrorism strategy, by the way.)

The substance of the campaigns he talks about might be far from encouraging for libertarians. None of these are limited government advocates. Politicized online social networks could be the agar in which a new mobocracy grows – something our republican form of government was designed to prevent.

But what’s the solution? To oppose democracy and an active citizenry? Other than restoring constitutional limits on government, I don’t think so. As with speech, the cure for bad democracy is more of it, but good.

It’s not a given that online politics will amount to crowds of avatars with digital pitchforks and torches. The Internet is a fertile medium for careful debate about our public policies. Social networks can be smart and informed – if they get the data.

That process is starting. USASpending.gov delivers data about where federal contracting dollars and grant awards go. This was a project of President-Elect Barack Obama who, with Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), made transparency a signature issue in the Senate. The non-profit effort that broke ground for this is OMBWatch’s FedSpending.org,which logged its 10 millionth search in June.

My humble effort, WashingtonWatch.com, attaches cost estimates to the bills in Congress and recently welcomed its millionth visitor for the year. The Sunlight Foundation has a list of insanely useful Web sites, each exposing some dimension of government action to greater public scrutiny. The organization is dedicated to developing a stable of private, non-profit, and volunteer efforts that promise revolutionary change once they can access standardized, structured, and open government data.

And that’s the bottleneck: access to good data. Government information now comes to us mediated by government Web sites and government-defined database queries. Getting the raw data would allow all kinds of actors to generate all kinds of new information about government. All citizens would have better information to work with, not only about taxes and spending, but about the results of government programs.

Libertarians bet that this would reduce demand for government. Liberals and progressives believe that this would deliver on the promise of government. If either side wins, we’re better off than we are here in the dark disappointment of government today.

On December 10th, the Cato Institute is having a policy forum on this topic. The title is “Just Give us the Data!“