E-Government & Transparency

Government Spending in XBRL?

by Jim Harper on December 22, 2008 · 28 comments

Mark Cuban probably didn’t know how much he’d rev up the hypocrisy meter when he suggested that the government should report its own spending and other financial information in XBRL. The SEC recently announced that it would require public companies to do their financial reporting in the format.

Having the government do it to is a GREAT idea.

And it will take years for that to happen.

Why? Because releasing information in a usable form is like releasing power. Agencies and bureaucrats aren’t in the business of giving away power.

I won’t lay predictions because the idea is so good that it may catch a head of steam, unify the transparency community, and get high-level attention in the administration. But barring that, it will be a cold day (today happens to be a cold day) when the government adopts XBRL. Until then, the hypocrisy meter is rising.

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On Government Transparency

by Jim Harper on December 15, 2008 · 9 comments

The video of last week’s Cato policy forum can be viewed here. (Check out TLFer Jerry Brito’s fine presentation.)

If your preference is for a briefer taste of the transparency issues, a podcast with Ed Felten recorded that day is here:

http://www.cato.org/weekly/flvplayer.swf

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Crowdsourced accountability project: Progress, but we still need help from developers

by Jerry Brito on December 14, 2008 · 34 comments

UPDATE: I’ve created a Google Group for this project. I hope you’ll join it and help us build this tool.

Last Thursday I asked for help creating a site that would facilitate crowdsourcing the task of prioritizing the 11,000+ projects proposed in the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ $73 billion “Main Street Economic Recovery” stimulus plan. The point of doing this is to help President-Elect Obama keep his promise that any stimulus spending will be directed at critical infrastructure, and not pork. Roads and bridges and schoolhouses are infrastructure, but dog parks and tennis centers in wealthy neighborhoods probably don’t count.

Software developer Kevin Dwyer stepped up to the plate, took the mayors’ report, and parsed out the projects into an SQLite database. You can find the database here and Kevin’s take on what he did here. Now that we have the data in an easy-to-remix format, I’d like to ask for your help developing the backend for the site.

Going forward I can offer graphic design and copywriting to the project, as well as cat-hearding, which are my comparative advantages. What I don’t have are the technical chops to code the backend. If you are a developer, or know someone who is, and might be willing to help, please read on. Continue reading →

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Technology for Opening Up Government

by Braden Cox on December 12, 2008 · 22 comments

can_opener Today’s event on “open” and “participatory” government at Google’s DC office was interesting, if inconclusive. We all agreed that making government more transparent and ready for participation by the citizenry was good. But I left not knowing what it all really means. Tech reporter Grant Gross has a good report, and here’s what I got out of it:

Disclosure — At a minimum, opening up government requires more disclosure. Any and all data, transcripts, reports, etc. should be put up on the web.
Format — Don’t just disclose, but make sure the information is formatted for ease of access and finding information. Funneling information will be really important. The spigot could pour out information, but if there’s no ability for citizens to find and understand issues that affect them, there’s only a partial benefit to being open. Opportunities for private sector here.
Participation — what this means, I’m still not entirely sure, but seems to be the notion that “we the people” should be more involved in government and tech can help us. It could mean regular comments from affected parties on agency and committee websites, not just the occasional responses to proposed rulemakings. However, flooding the process with “white noise” could be a problem, as could be self-selection for those who post comments (so there should be caution when gauging public opinion writ-large).

Someone on the panel mentioned mySociety, which is a nonprofit org in the UK that designed a website service called FixMyStreet. The site acts as a middleman between residents that want to report potholes and the proper authorities to fix them. This is an interesting private sector approach for using technology to help us participate at the local government level. Likewise, Jim Harper’s WashingtonWatch helps track legislation in Congress, and provides opportunities for comments.

Ultimately, no matter what technologies exist and how many private sector initiatives there are, we need buy-in from government. Technology will help, but it’ll take behavioral changes by the powers-that-be to really use and implement web 2.0 tools. Government 2.0 will hopefully result in better decision-making and increased accountability.

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Note to Obama: The FCC Needs Transparency

by Sonia Arrison on December 12, 2008 · 4 comments

This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a report accusing Kevin Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, of being deceptive and opaque in his management of the agency’s affairs. That a politician would pull such moves is no surprise, but the report should send a strong signal to the incoming Obama administration. “Chairman Martin withheld important and relevant data from the other Commissioners during their consideration of the 13th Annual Video Competition Report in an apparent attempt to enable the Commission to regulate cable television companies,” the report states. This finding was one of many pointing out how the Chairman wielded his power inappropriately. It is common knowledge that Chairman Martin personally dislikes the cable companies. This animosity seems to be what drove his reintroduction of a rule to require a 30-percent market share cap on cable companies. In 2001, the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down a similar cap; since then, competition in the video services market has skyrocketed. When asked why Chairman Martin would reintroduce a rule already rejected by the courts, Joy Sims, a spokesperson for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, simply said, “Look at the House report issued today.” One man’s vendetta, the report reveals, has the ability to influence an entire industry. To those who marvel at that reality, Berin Szoka of the Progress and Freedom Foundation explains that “the FCC is one of the most unaccountable agencies. The problem is not isolated to Chairman Martin, but was probably worse under him because of his war on cable.” […] Read more here.

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Big bleg: Let’s help Obama crowdsource-out the pork

by Jerry Brito on December 11, 2008 · 20 comments

The stimulus plan President-Elect Barack Obama has recently described would help jump-start the economy at the same time it renews our country’s vital infrastructure. And the president-elect is serious about making smart investments. Here he is on Meet the Press last Sunday (emphasis mine):

Well, I think we can get a lot of work done fast. When I met with the governors, all of them have projects that are shovel ready, that are going to require us to get the money out the door, but they’ve already lined up the projects and they can make them work. And now, we’re going to have to prioritize it and do it not in the old traditional politics first wave. What we need to do is examine what are the projects where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck, how are we going to make sure taxpayers are protected. You know, the days of just pork coming out of Congress as a strategy, those days are over.

Well, it’s not just the governors that have “shovel-ready” projects lined up for federal funding, the nation’s mayors also have plenty of projects at the ready. You can see what these projects are at the U.S. Conference of Mayors site where they have published a “MainStreet Economic Recovery Report” along with a database of the projects, their cost, how many jobs they are expected to create, all sorted by state.

As Reason’s Robert Poole points out in the Wall Street Journal, however, not all of the 11,391 ready-to-go projects would qualify as smart investments:

What vital infrastructure projects would cash-strapped taxpayers get for their $73 billion? Here’s a sampling: – Hercules, Calif., wants $2.5 million in hard-earned taxpayer money for a “Waterfront Duck Pond Park,” and another $200,000 for a dog park. – Euless, Texas, wants $15 million for the Midway Park Family Life Center, which, you’ll be glad to note, includes both a senior center and aquatic facility. – Natchez, Miss., “needs” a new $9.5 million sports complex “which would allow our city to host major regional and national sports tournaments.” – Henderson, Nev., is asking for $20 million to help “develop a 60 acre multi-use sports field complex.” – Brigham City, Utah, wants $15 million for a sports park. – Arlington, Texas, needs $4 million to expand its tennis center. – Miami, Fla., needs $15 million for a “Moore Park Community Center, Tennis Center and Day Care” facility. The city is also desperate for $3.6 million to build a covered basketball court and a new tennis court at Robert King High Park. Then there’s the $94 million Orange Bowl parking garage you are being asked to pay for. – La Porte, Texas, wants $7.6 million for a “Life Style Center.” And Oakland, Calif., needs $1 million for Fruitvale Latino Cultural and Performing Arts Center. And you thought infrastructure investment meant roads, bridges and schools. It is clear that any infrastructure stimulus money given to the country’s mayors will lead to thousands of tennis centers to nowhere.

Here is my bleg: Let’s help President-Elect Obama do what he is promising. Let’s help him “prioritize” so the projects so that we “get the most bang for the buck” and identify those that are old school “pork coming out of Congress”. We can do this through good clean fun crowdsourcing. Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each project into a wiki-page or other mechanism where local citizens can comment on whether the project is actually needed or whether it’s a boondoggle? How can we create an app that will let citizens separate the wheat from the pork and then sort for Congress and the new administration the project in descending order or relevancy?

I have some technical chops, but in many ways I wouldn’t know where to start. Any takers? If there are, my colleagues and I would love to dive into this and we can probably scrounge up some resources. Who’s with us?

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Congrats to FCC.gov on five years without an update

by Jerry Brito on December 11, 2008 · 6 comments

Congratulations are in order for the FCC, which today celebrates five years since it last updated its online docket search system, ECFS. If you look at the bottom of the main search page, you will see the mark of this amazing feat: “updated 12/11/03”. In internet years that like a century. Kudos!

Yesterday at the Cato Institute panel on online transparency (video forthcoming here) I laid into the FCC for being an agency that’s supposed to be tech savvy, but that continues to have an online presence that is absolutely abysmal. Their docketing system is the agency’s lifeblood and yet there is no full-text search, there are no data feeds, and their robots.txt file is set to exclude search crawlers. This is totally unacceptable and I hope a tech-savvy Obama FCC will revamp the site.

Today the Washington Post features Google’s push to modernize government sites to allow it and other commercial search engines to index those sites:

[T]he U.S. government, one of the world’s largest depositories of data, has been unwilling or unable to make millions of its Web pages accessible [to search engines]. “The vast majority of information is still not searchable or findable either because it’s not published or it’s on Web sites which the government has put up which no one can index,” Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said during a recent presentation at the New America Foundation. … Today, a wide array of public information remains largely invisible to the search engines, and therefore to the general public, because it is held in such a way that the Web search engines of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can’t find it and index it. Not surprisingly, Yahoo and Microsoft officials agree that people would be better served if more public information became accessible to their search engines.

While an Obama administration could help solve this problem administratively by implementing Google’s sitemap scheme, Congress could also mandate that agencies make their data searchable. That’s exactly one of the thing that the Joe Lieberman-sponsored E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007 would do. Take your pick, just give us the data!

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Connecticut Towns: Arm hurt? Cut it off!

by Jerry Brito on December 7, 2008 · 7 comments

The NY Times reports today that towns in Connecticut are shuttering their websites because they’re finding it too costly to comply with a new state transparency law that requires towns with websites to “post minutes from public meetings on the site within seven days of the meeting and must give residents at least 24 hours notice of special meetings through the site.” Seems a bit drastic to me. The story explains:

“We decided we couldn’t do what was required right away,” said Frank J. Chiaramonte, first selectman of Harwinton. “So we shut down our site.” In many small towns, volunteers run the Web sites. Asking the volunteers to type up the minutes of a meeting and to then also put the minutes online,all within seven days, is too much to ask, Mr. Chiaramonte said. “Some commissions still do minutes in longhand,” he added.

Here’s a tip that may or may not help towns comply with the law: record the public meeting with a cheap MP3 recorder and upload the file to the site. Boom. Instant transparency. Want to get a little fancier? Shoot the MP3 to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and for a few dollars have the audio transcribed or turned into minutes. Or set up a wiki and let citizens do it.

Like I said, these suggestions might not produce official minutes needed to comply with the law, but it’s the kind of measure I’d like to see instead of shuttering whole sites. One other thing, with storage and recording equipment so cheap, there’s no reason why every public meeting in the country, from the federal government to school boards, shouldn’t be online within a day or two. Enough excuses, folks.

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Transparently Ironic

by Jim Harper on December 7, 2008 · 11 comments

The memo from John Podesta articulating the transition’s “‘Seat at the Table’ Transparency Policy” is redacted. Redactions are kind of a red flag to transparency fiends, but they’re probably appropriate (a name, an email address).

The overall “Seat at the Table” program is a decent step forward. You can get a look at the documents submitted to the transition, search them (somewhat clumsily – and not more often than once every 15 seconds), and comment on them.

So carry on transparently, Change.gov!

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Obama CTO might want to check out D.C.’s CTO

by Jerry Brito on December 5, 2008 · 10 comments

First, Jim Harper would kill me if I didn’t begin this post by mentioning that I’ll be speaking at a Cato Institute lunch panel entitled, “Just Give Us the Data! Prospects for Putting Government Information to Revolutionary New Uses,” on Wednesday, Dec. 10, along with Ed Felten of Princeton and Gary Bass of OMB Watch. RSVP here. That said, I want to talk about CTOs.

A while back I engaged in a debate about whether Barack Obama’s promise to appoint a national chief technology office should be feared. I think the question turns on whether this person will be CTO of the United States or CTO of the U.S. Federal Government. While I personally believe the former should be feared, the latter should be welcomed.

The good news is that in all of Obama’s pronouncement’s on the matter the position has always been described as having a brief to open the government by employing online tools. Here’s how the position is described in Obama’s campaign position paper on technology:

Bring Government into the 21st Century: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will use technology to reform government and improve the exchange of information between the federal government and citizens while ensuring the security of our networks. Obama and Biden believe in the American people and in their intelligence, expertise, and ability and willingness to give and to give back to make government work better. Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.

To me this sounds more like a Chief Transparency Officer, and that’s a good thing. Most federal government websites are terrible relative to the state of the art. Any effort to make them as useful or informative as the barackobama.com website should be welcomed. We can see the beginning of this transformation at the new change.gov site for the Obama transition team.

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