Transparency vs. Responsibility

Back in 2001, a report called "e-government: The Next American Revolution," based on findings of a survey conducted by Hart-Teeter for the Council for Excellence in Government, found:

"Americans have an agenda for e-government that is more ambitious than just cutting paperwork or time spent waiting in line. They see its potential for giving citizens more information, which gives people the power to hold their government more accountable."

Eight years later, that agenda is a lot closer to reality than to dream.

The Sunlight Foundation

In a discussion today (9/17/09) on C-SPAN, Sunlight Foundation Executive Director and Co-Founder Ellen Miller described how, by the use of the Internet and technology, we have come a long way in many areas of government transparency.

The three-year-old foundation is now funding the digitizing of information about congress and the executive branch that prior to this had only been available in paper form.

On top of such newly available data, along with existing electronic data, they are also providing tools to allow the average citizen to make use of this information, on websites like Open Congress where tens of thousands of people go to find out about legislation. Not interpreted information, but the actual, searchable, text of bills.

Some of this information, Ms. Miller mentioned, we have dug out of basements of obscure government agencies, or the office of the US Congress.

Databases

In new a database being release next week (keep an eye on the foundation's site) you can, for example, establish what Americans lobby on behalf of foreign governments. It is a new searchable database from records in the basement of the justice department that citizens, journalists, bloggers, can search, country by country, or legislator by legislator to see who were lobbied by these lobbyists; you can also search by lobbyist.

This effort is now bringing data together to answer questions like: "Who is the highest paid lobbyist?" and "What foreign government spends most money on lobbyists?"

Also, the foundation has established searchable congressional record, day by day. Each day the congressional record contains more words than "Tale of Two Cities" but this site allows citizens to search for the words most used that day, on a cite called Capitol Words.

The Sunlight Foundation has as an unstated mission to combine data from many sources to make it more useable, searchable and summarizable (digestible) by the average citizen.

As Ms. Miller said, "This is what the new technology offers; this is the connected age. We no longer need expert filters, for now we have the tools to gather and combine the information we need or want."

Another example is Open Secrets, a database with information on lobbyists.

A New Wiki

Little Sis is a wiki described as an involuntary FaceBook for the powerful, where contributors are right now focusing on revolving door lobbyists in the health care industry--contributed by people doing their own research--about those who used to work for members of Congress and who are now health care lobbyists.

Ms. Miller pointed out that the wiki technology allows you to pool the wisdom of the crowd; allows you to add a lot of sources of relevant information.

Other Transparency Sites

Through Read The Bill the foundation is asking congress to put bills under consideration on this site for public comment for at least 72 hours before deciding on the bill.

Also, research (funded by Pew Charitable Trusts) is now taking place, and being posted on Subsidy Scope revealing the extent of Government Subsidies--attempting to document this huge government spending item; including bank bailout money, how much, to whom. The next area of investigation is the transportation sector.

Information is Power

"Information is Power," said Thomas Jefferson; and at this intersection between technology and political information, it seems that this power is being made available to the general citizen.

Citizen Involvement

Apparently, 50 Million people went online during the last election cycle to obtain political information; and 25 million of those also contributed data, whether through comments or blog posts or email. That's a huge potential base of interested people.

But how many citizens actually visit today's government transparency sites. When asked directly how much traffic the foundation sees to their sites, Ms. Miller evaded the question, and instead talked of dramatic increases in traffic (without giving any numbers) during hotly contested bills.

And when asked how she would gauge the success of the Sunlight Foundation, she gave a two-fold answer: "By seeing Government take more responsibility for providing information in a digestible format. Data.gov is a good first step."

Her second answer, however, revealed that the current level of citizen involvement is not where it should be: "Also, by the citizen use of this information. We want to see more and more citizens come to our sites."

This tells me that while the data, and the tools to sound this data, is becoming increasingly available, citizen interest and responsibility to keep informed is not expanding commensurately.

Leading a horse to water comes to mind.

Food for thought.