Chris Soghoian has the story.
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.)
The new Whitehouse.gov went live shortly after Barack Obama became president yesterday. It has much of the look and feel of his transition Web site, Change.gov.
Among the featured items on the homepage today (they will change regularly, of course) is the site itself and the new administration’s commitment to transparency. However, the actual terms of that commitment come up pretty anemic.
In a post on the White House blog, Director of New Media Macon Phillips says:
President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise. The President’s executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.
Executive orders and proclamations? Information about senior leadership and the President’s priorities? That’s not breaking any new ground on transparency.
The transition’s “Seat at the Table” program required “any documents from official meetings with outside organizations [to] be posted on our website for people to review and comment on.”
The decision to port this practice over to the White House has either not been made, or has been decided against. Given that meetings are already happening, it will be a tough policy to implement if it is not implemented right away.
There is an “Office of Public Liaison” (and intergovernmental affairs) on the Whitehouse.gov site, but it’s nothing more than an email submission form at this point. “More ways for you to interact” are promised.
Words aren’t deeds, and it’s already too late to demonstrate a day-one commitment to transparency. Let’s hope the first steps of the new administration are not steps away from the important transparency precedents set by the transition.
Update: As I wrote this post, news stories were coming out about new executive orders coming out dealing with ethics and transparency. Though I haven’t been able to find them yet – hint hint, Whitehouse.gov – the change to the interpretation of FOIA sound like a welcome, if modest, step in the right direction.
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.
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
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 →
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.
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.
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!
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 Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.