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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In early December, Jerry Brito asked whether Obama’s proposal to create the post of  Chief Technology Officer (CTO) should be feared or welcomed:

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.

I agree completely—and it now seems that this is in fact where the incoming Administration is heading.  BusinessWeek reports that the Obama Administration has narrowed its choices down to two Indian-American CTOs:

• Vivek Kundra, D.C.’s CTO
• Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO

Judging by BusinessWeek’s short descriptions, both candidates sound terrifically well-qualified to lead implementation of Obama’s oft-repeated promises to bring the United States government into the Web 2.0 era.  More importantly, the fact that the two likely candidates are CTOs—rather than, say, advocates of any particular technology policy agenda—strongly suggests that the Obama administration isn’t contemplating giving the CTO authority to set technology policy outside the Federal government.  

Whomever Obama chooses in the end will have his or her work cut out for them.  While free marketeers may indeed have much to fear from Obama’s technology policy agenda in terms of over-regulation, increased government control and market-distorting subsidies, e-government is one area where we ought to be able to cheer the new President on:   The Federal government could be made much more transparent and democratically accountable if Federal agencies simply adopted some of the tools users take for granted on private websites-such as RSS feeds and standardized data. 

Let’s just hope that Obama makes it very clear in creating the CTO post that its responsibilities are indeed strictly limited directing adoption of information technology inside the Federal government, so that the position doesn’t mushroom into the more powerful “Technology Czar” some rightly fear.

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.

The Administrative Law Section of the ABA recently released an excellent report about the state of online access to the federal regulatory process that underscores the need for a more coherent government-wide technology policy. The report finds that while the Bush administration centralized regulatory docket management among executive agencies (and public access to those dockets at Regulations.gov) it allowed each agency to decide for itself what to include in the database without enforcing any kind of standardized metadata. This makes a centralized approach virtually useless and in fact can make finding data difficult. The ABA task force recommends a more-decentralized built around common data and metadata standards.

Also, until recently the Regulations.gov site did not offer structured feeds or full-text search. Even now it only offers one RSS feed for all federal agencies, which I parse out at OpenRegulations.org. What’s more, the official feed only publishes Federal Register notices and ignores comments, supporting materials, or other docket filings. Imagine instead if you could subscribe to a particular proposed regulation and be notified in your RSS reader each time a new document was added to the docket. Imagine all the mashups that would be made possible. That would be closer to the sort of basic use of structured data that we see on blogs and which should be a no-brainer for a 21st Century government website.

A model for the national CTO might be the District of Columbia’s CTO, which was brought to my attention by Maxine Teller. The D.C. CTO’s site offers a Data Catalog that has a virtual cornucopia of government data made available in structured feeds—from juvenile arrests to registered vacant property to the most recent roadkill pickups. Vivek Kundra, the current CTO, encourages the remixing and mashing of all this data. The office recently held an X-Prize-like contest to encourage developers to make innovative apps. Here are the results. I don’t see any budget or spending data feeds on the D.C. site, however, and I hope that’s something they plan to add soon.

If a national CTO is meant to bring vision and leadership to the federal government’s IT—especially as it relates to making public information available and useful online like D.C. has done,—then I’m all for it.