Today's guest blog is a three-part series from Matt Rosenberg. Matt is founder and editor of Public Data Ferret, a project of the non-profit Public Eye Northwest in Seattle, Washington.

U.S. President Barack Obama this autumn joined with other global leaders to formally unveil the Open Government Partnership as the United Nations met in New York City. Funding for the partnership so far is $733,500 from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, $350,000 from Google and in-kind contributions from the U.S. government, World Bank Institute and others. The eight charter members have already formalized their commitment to the core principles of disclosure, engagement, integrity, innovation and accountability. The eight are the Year One co-leaders the U.S. and Brazil, plus Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Another 38 countries are committed to joining, many from eastern and northern Europe but also seven from South and Central America, four from Africa and three from the Middle East. An important step in the partnership's agenda will come at a March 2012 Brazil meeting with the presentation by each new member of an open government plan of their own, against which future actions can be measured.

The New York event gave rise to the expected lofty statements. In a speech, Philippines President Benigno S. Acquino III, remarked: "This is what democracy is all about: having a government disciplined enough to imbibe in itself the principles of transparency, accountability, and citizen involvement-the necessary preconditions to poverty alleviation and inclusive and sustainable economic growth."

Who could be against imbibing that? But in an open society the media don't always parrot the party line. Only the day prior, news reporters had chastised the White House in print for an advance briefing on the Open Government Partnership by State Department officials who insisted on being described only as "Senior Administration Official 1" and "Senior Administration Official 2". Standard operating procedure in most high-level briefings, true. But, implied the reaction - from the Associated Press, Tech President, and Politico, to name a few - rather discordant for a big "transparency" initiative. It wasn't the first time in recent months that the gap between words and deeds on U.S. open government efforts had drawn notice.

The day after the partnership's formal unveiling, J. Nicholas Hoover of Information Week wrote:

...the Obama administration's commitment to open government hasn't always lived up to its rhetoric. For example, the White House has aggressively pursued whistleblowers and leakers of information, and in court cases has regularly used the defense that certain data must be shielded from the public as state secrets. (A March 2011) event recognizing Obama for a commitment to open government was ironically closed to the press...Congress' record in recent years has also been mixed. For example, while the websites of congressional committees now nearly universally stream congressional hearings, Congress has slashed a key source of funding for transparency efforts. Federal court records are also difficult to access online, and are often available only behind a paywall. The new National Action Plan and international partnership on open government are positive additional steps pointing toward increased transparency, but will ultimately be judged by their execution, and not the initial plans.

Exactly right. Success for OGP will begin with helping member nations understand how to best harness the passion and capacity of disparate ground-level actors - particularly NGOs, local governments, journalists, students, engaged citizens, artists and social media users. To complement important data they already have on the communications and personal technology preferences of constituents, OGP nations should commission independent surveys on how the civic landscapes in their respective nations are perceived at home.

This qualitative harvesting must be incisive and unflinching because real conditions on the ground greatly shape implementation of open government. Earlier this year I led a conversation on transparency with mid-career government officials from Yemen, Tunisia, Guineau, Djibouti, India, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Lithuania and South Korea, who were among the enrollees in a year-long program as Hubert H. Humphrey Fellows at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs, in Seattle. The dominant concern of the group was how to develop a flexible model for building open government systems, keeping in mind widely varying socio-political environments in different nations. Participants identified some of the big questions that need to guide any open government visioning at national scale. These fell into two broad areas.

1. Political culture. Are political corruption and cronyism an animating concern? How is the national government experienced, on the whole, by the populace? As an authoritative patriarch which discourages close scrutiny? As despotic and dangerous, or unstable? As a work in progress, or  in the best case as genuinely transparent, strategic and collaborative? Do the principles of universal human rights have purchase, and is there true freedom of the press or not?
2. Education, economy and technology. What is the state of education in the country - do scientific and secular views hold sway or not? Are higher ed and institutional R&D in a healthy state, and is there a burgeoning community of public-spirited software developers? Is the economy open or state-run?  What are the particulars of technology adoption and access across class lines?

The answers will help guide whether an  open government planning process can even be credibly launched in a given nation, and how; or whether it may be wiser to take a more incremental approach.

Read the rest of Matt's post tomorrow...

It seems the Obama administration has decided the time has come to once again flex its ethics muscles. The Office of Government Ethics announced rules that would extend a lobbyist gift ban to all government employees. The Office of Management and Budget issued guidelines to executive branch agencies to prohibit them from allowing lobbyists to sit on federal boards and commissions.

Generally, we like to applaud the administration for making strides to address influence peddling in Washington, but there comes a point where baby steps simply aren’t big enough to reach the heights necessary to really clean up Washington.

It is long past time for this administration to stop focusing on the low-hanging fruit and take the initiative to address the real and dangerous avenues of influence in our political system. Where should they start? How about with a long dormant executive order that would disclose hidden money given by federal contractors to influence elections? The administration has had ready, since at least April, an executive order that would require disclosure of dark money contributions funneled through shadow campaign organizations. The Chamber of Commerce and its allies in Congress objected to the draft executive order when it was leaked and the administration seems to have given up on it.

And where is the president on the opaque Super Committee? When he signed the law (negotiated in secret) creating the powerful deficit cutting committee, he failed at the time to insist that the bill include a single provision requiring the committee to operate in the sunlight. Now that there are legislative proposals that would correct that omission by requiring disclosure of campaign contributions and special interest lobbying meetings, the administration has remained silent rather than encouraging speedy passage of the law by Congress.

Finally, there is the whole new specter of unlimited secret corporate money infiltrating elections as a result of the Citizens United. The president came out forcefully against the decision. But when the DISCLOSE Act died in Congress, the administration did not come out in support of a streamlined disclosure-only bill. In fact, just the opposite. Administration cohorts and allies started up their own super PAC to solicit funds from the deepest pockets to pay for ads designed to help with the president’s re-election.

That’s what the administration hasn’t done to address dark money in politics. So what about what it is doing? Are the baby steps going to make a difference? Maybe. But we have to ask whether transparency wouldn’t be a less draconian, more effective way of addressing potential avenues of influence in the executive branch. For example, rather than banning lobbyists from federal boards and commissions, while still permitting bank CEOs, oil executives and labor bosses to sit on those boards, wouldn’t it be better if there were more disclosure of myriad financial interests of everyone on a federal advisory board? And on that OGE gift ban, will non-lobbyist lobbyists be able to make their case while nibbling finger food at conferences with executive branch employees, while lobbyists who register and report are shut out of the process? And while we are at it, does the administration think so little of its executive branch employees that it believes they can be bought for the price of a cheese square on a toothpick and a glass of cheap chardonnay?

The administration’s baby steps would look less like cynical ploy to appear strong on ethics if they were coupled with at least some effort to acknowledge the big picture and the big money that is infecting our political process. It’s time for the administration to grow up.

Last Friday, the House passed a measure that aims to block any executive order regarding disclosure of political donations.

Eighteen House Democrats joined almost every Republican to support the amendment, while another eight Democrats did not vote at all. All other Democrats opposed it. The measure was attached to an energy and water appropriations bill and would prohibit the use of any funding to implement an Obama administration effort to require more information on campaign spending.

On average, the 18 Democrats House members received about 63 percent of their campaign contributions from corporate sources for the 2010 election, according to an analysis of Center for Responsive Politics data. This was calculated by totaling each members’ donations from 14 13 sectors (such as defense and finance) identified by CRP but excluding donations from the following sectors: lawyers and lobbyists, Labor, ideological or single-issue groups and groups labeled ‘other.’

Of the 18 congressmen, Reps. Mike Ross, Jim Matheson, and Colin Peterson relied most on corporate PACs and employees during the last election, taking in nearly 85 percent from those sources. Reps. Henry Cuellar and Dan Boren received nearly 80 percent of their campaign cash from corporate sources.

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The amendment they voted for sought to preempt an Obama administration effort, first disclosed in April, to issue an executive order that would require all government contractors to disclose their political contributions, including those to organizations that don't disclose their donors. It was meant as a response to Citizens United v. FEC, where the Supreme Court ruled to remove restrictions on corporations’ expenditures in elections.

That ruling opened the floodgates for some undisclosed election spending. Nonprofit organizations can now receive corporate donations and make independent expenditures on elections without reporting their donors to the Federal Election Commission. Crossroads GPS spent $15 million opposing Democratic candidates last election; because it's organized as a section 501(c)4 committee, it's not required to disclose its donors. Similarly, because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a 501(c)6 organization, it doesn't have to disclose its donors, despite spending more than $32 million in the 2010 cycle to influence elections.

Democrats have gotten into the act as well, recently launching Priorities USA Action, a 501(c)4 organization that was co-founded by former White House spokesman Bill Burton.

Obama's executive order would bring some unknown corporate donations to nonprofits into the public realm. It would also make the donations of the nation’s largest union, AFL-CIO, known, because it has small contracts with the Department of Labor.

   

Tomorrow morning I will be testifying before the full House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the Sunlight Foundation's work to liberate federal spending data and experience in developing databases and tools for tracking spending. The hearing, entitled "Achieving Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending," will be the second opportunity for me to discuss the Sunlight Foundation's Clearspending report where we identified nearly $1.3 trillion in misreported federal spending. The two hour hearing should be live-streamed on the committee website and will start at 9:30 am in Rayburn 2154.

It is an exciting time to continue this important conversation as just today there were two new federal spending developments. The House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) introduced a major piece of transparency legislation that would transform how we track federal spending and identify waste, fraud and abuse. You can read more about the bill from a blog post by Daniel Schuman, Sunlight's policy counsel. The White House also issued an executive order today that will put Vice President Biden in charge of an 11-member oversight board — very similar to the Recovery and Accountability Transparency Board — to address federal agency waste and fraud.

The entirety of my remarks appear below:

6-14-11 - Written Testimony of Ellen Miller before the Committee on House Oversight and Government Reform

During the 2010 midterm election David and Charles Koch, owners of the massive energy conglomerate Koch Industries, became the face of secret donors to a new set of political groups spawned by the controversial Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. Koch Industries is also a longtime government contractor receiving $85 million in contracts over the past eleven years. These two facts may not seem to overlap, but if President Obama signs a draft executive order leaked this week Koch Industries and a large number of the nation’s companies would face the prospect of having to disclose their now-secret contributions to political efforts when they seek new federal contracts.

The centerpiece of the draft order, which requires disclosure of a variety of contributions that are already disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, is its requirement that any organization bidding on a federal contract disclose contributions made by the organization, its subsidiaries, and its directors to any third party group intending on using that money for independent expenditures or electioneering communications.

The order specifically targets a disclosure loophole created by the Citizens United ruling. The ruling opened the door for a whole host of organizations, including 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations, to run electoral advertisements without disclosing their donors to the public. The most notable of these groups is Crossroads GPS, a conservative nonprofit that spent more than $15 million on advertisements opposing Democratic candidates for office in the 2010 midterm election.

Under the order donations to Crossroads GPS and other groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Americans for Prosperity would have to be disclosed by companies seeking federal contracts.

The order is an attempt by the White House to do what Congress could not do when it failed to pass a legislative response to Citizens United, known as the DISCLOSE Act, at the end of last year.

By applying to all organizations submitting a bid for contract the order would cover a huge swath of the country's companies. JPMorgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, and the aforementioned Koch Industries all hold government contracts. Thirty-three of the forty-one companies listed in the top 100 campaign contributors over the past two decades are recipients of federal contracts. According to USASpending.gov, there are 129,083 recipients of federal contracts, although many of these may be duplicates.

Even News Corporation, the owner of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post, is a government contractor. The executive order would require both the company and its owner Rupert Murdoch to disclose contributions to political groups. Last year News Corporation contributed $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which already discloses its donors, and, according to a New York Times investigation, another $1 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which does not disclose its donors.

That Times investigation uncovered a number of contributors to the Chamber’s political efforts, most of whom also hold government contracts and would face new disclosure rules under the potential executive order. In addition to News Corporation, Dow Chemical, Aegon, Chevron Texaco, Prudential Financial, and Alpha Technologies all contributed to the Chamber of Commerce in recent years while holding government contracts.

While the order would certainly not apply retroactively these companies would have to disclose their political giving for the two previous years if they sought a new contract from the government.

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., criticized the draft Executive Order for stifling speech and failing to cover unions that support the President and his party, “This order is a purely political act offered under the benign label of disclosure. The order would not impose the same requirements on the labor unions or other organizations who support the President.” While many unions receive federal grants there are few receiving federal contracts.

One notable exception is the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, the AFL-CIO, which received small contracts from the Department of Labor as recently as last year. USASpending.gov lists two purchase orders from 2010 for contracts with the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute. The contracts were with the Department of Labor and Department of Transportation. The draft order does not distinguish between types of contracts, thus any future contract with the AFL-CIO would trigger the same disclosure requirements applied to corporations with contracts.

Some companies already voluntarily disclose contributions to political groups on their corporate websites, although most of the time the information is dated, poorly defined, or not explained.

General Dynamics lists contributions to political nonprofits, but does not provide names. Instead, the defense contractor lists $125,000 in contributions to three 501(c)(4) nonprofits.

The top recipient of contract dollars from the federal government, Lockheed Martin, lists contributions it made to trade associations in 2010 including a $50,000 contribution to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Lockheed states, “We believe that the non-deductible portion of our dues is for trade association lobbying.”

Northrop Grumman and Raytheon Corporation detail their contributions to candidates and 527s, but do not explain a policy for contributions to other politically active organizations. Meanwhile, Pfizer releases an annual report on its political action committee contributions, which does not list contributions to nonprofits or trade associations.

On Sunday CBS’ 60 Minutes ran an expose on new corporate tax havens. Leslie Stahl, reporting the story, interviewed Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers who stated that companies located offshore to avoid the thirty-five percent U.S. corporate tax rate wanted to repatriate their earnings at a lower rate. Chambers stated that the money was “trapped,” a term that Stahl echoed. Never mentioned in the story was that Chambers is leading a coalition of corporations and trade groups, including the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to lobby Congress and the Obama administration for a tax repatriation holiday.

The WIN America Coalition is a collection of seventeen corporations and four trade groups advocating for a one-time tax repatriation holiday. The coalition consists of some of the biggest corporate backers of the Obama Administration including Duke Energy, Google, Microsoft, and Pfizer.

The seventeen corporations spent over $50 million on lobbying in 2010 and employed some of the best tax lobbying firms in Washington. Cisco’s lobbying operation is heavily focused on taxes, with the firm Ernst & Young, which employs numerous former staffers of congressional tax writing committees, leading the way.

One of Ernst & Young’s lobbyists is Nick Giordano, former chief tax counsel to the Senate Finance Committee and legislative director for Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus. He is one of forty-three former staffers of congressional tax writing committees that were hired by the WIN America companies in 2010.

According to data obtained from the Center for Responsive Politics, seventy-eight percent of the WIN America corporation lobbyists have previous government experience.

Twenty-six of those lobbyists previously worked on the Senate Finance Committee or for members of the committee; sixteen worked on the House Ways & Means Committee or for committee members; five worked at the Treasury Department; and one worked for the Joint Committee on Taxation.

The coalition also employed two former members of Congress as lobbyists in 2010. Former Sen. Tim Hutchinson and former Rep. Bob Livingston were both employed by Oracle America.

While the Obama administration has remained cool to the idea outside of a total overhaul of the corporate tax system, it may take notice as many of the WIN America companies are likely to be financial supporters of the president's reelection campaign.

Recently, President Obama reached out to the Silicon Valley community in a private sit-down with tech executives and the venture capitalists funding new projects. Those companies included WIN America members Apple, Cisco Systems, Google, and Oracle. These four combined to donate $1.3 million to the 2008 Obama campaign. Duke Energy, another WIN America member, is providing a $10 million line of credit to fund the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina next year.

The companies involved in the coalition are part of a growing trend of companies shifting profits and earnings overseas to avoid paying taxes at the thirty-five percent rate. Google’s tax rate is around two percent; Pfizer’s has dropped to well below the thirty-five percent rate; Oracle’s tax rate is remarkably low, as it has shifted profits offshore.

The firms involved in the WIN America Coalition frame their case for a one-time tax holiday in one way, as Oracle President Safra Catz said, “it will create jobs.”

According to a Congressional Research Service report, the already existing evidence does not support this conclusion. In 2004 the government enacted a tax repatriation holiday as part of a short-term stimulus bill, the American Jobs Creation Act. The CRS Report shows that the holiday increased repatriation of earnings at a lower tax rate, but did not create jobs. In fact, the companies taking most advantage of the holiday cut jobs in the United States after repatriating earnings rather than created jobs.

The report also shows that the majority of the repatriated earnings came from the pharmaceutical and computer/electronic industries. These industries are currently the biggest supporters of the WIN America Coalition.

Sunshine Week starts with a new report from the National Security Archive and the Knight Foundation that finds only 49 of 90 agencies have adopted 'concrete steps' to improve their responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests. This is incredibly disheartening, though an improvement on the numbers from last year's study that found 13 of 90 agencies following up. The agencies' failure to meet even the administration's low bar is unacceptable. The two 'concerte steps' are simply updating the language in FOIA training documents to presume openness and to assess whether resources for compliance are adequate.

The report stems from Obama's Executive Order that called for greater FOIA openness [link], one of the first official acts he made as President, a follow-up memo from Attorney General Eric Holder detailing the new principles on FOIA [pdf link] and another memo a year later from former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and former Counsel to the President Bob Bauer asking agencies to please take the baby steps previously promised [pdf link].

“At this rate, the president’s first term in office will be over by the time federal agencies do what he asked them to do on his first day in office,” commented Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which funded the study. “Freedom of information laws exist to help all of us get the information we need for this open society to function. Yet government at all levels seems to have a great deal of trouble obeying its own transparency laws.”

Modeled after the California Sunshine Survey and subsequent state “FOI Audits,” the Archive’s series of Knight Open Government Surveys started in 2002 and use open government laws to test whether or not agencies are obeying those same laws. Recommendations from previous Knight Open Government Surveys led directly to laws and executive orders which have: set explicit customer service guidelines, mandated FOIA backlog reduction, assigned individualized FOIA tracking numbers, forced agencies to report the average number of days needed to process requests, and revealed the (often embarrassing) ages of the oldest pending FOIA requests.

Among the varying responses from agencies, the most stunning result was the U.S. Postal Service saying it had "no responsive records" and never even received the Emanuel-Bauer memo! Below is a chart of the ratings of each agency:

President Obama is sitting down tonight with a number of top Silicon Valley executives to discuss "innovation." Or is this the first effort to reach out to friendly campaign donors for the President's reelection bid?

A number of these organizations also have sophisticated lobbying operations in Washington. They have spent millions in the past year and, with Facebook ramping up their lobbying presence in 2011, will likely spend more this year.

Below you'll find the 2010 lobbying spending and 2008 campaign contributions to President Obama from employees and political action committees for the companies present at tonight's meeting.

	Lobbying (2010)	Contributions to Obama (2008)
Apple	$1,610,000.00	$92,141.00
Google	$5,160,000.00	$803,436.00
Facebook	$351,390.00	$34,850.00
Yahoo	$2,230,000.00	$164,051.00
Cisco Systems	$2,010,000.00	$187,472.00
Twitter	$0.00	$750.00
Oracle	$4,850,000.00	$243,194.00
NetFlix	$130,000.00	$19,485.00
Stanford University	$370,000.00	$448,720.00
Genentech	$4,922,368.00	$97,761.00
Westly Group	$0.00	$0.00

All data comes from the Center for Responsive Politics.

The alternative energy heavy NextEra Energy already had six different firms helping it lobby on tax policy when it brought Akin Gump Straus Hauer and Feld, one of the three biggest lobbying firms in Washington over the past decade, into the fray in the last months of 2010. A tax fight was gearing up and NextEra Energy, along with other companies, sought to preserve newly won tax breaks that have helped to push their tax burdens to among the lowest in the nation.

In this year’s State of the Union address, President Obama said that “a parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit particular companies and industries. Those with accountants or lawyers to work the system can end up paying no taxes at all. But all the rest are hit with one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and it has to change.”

It looks as though the alternative energy industry and their lobbyists won’t be one of the losers in any proposed corporate tax reform. The administration has repeatedly gone to bat for the tax provisions sought by alternative energy lobbyists.

NextEra Energy is one of six energy companies that pay less than five percent in taxes, according to a collection of data from Capitol IQ by Business Insider. The data is an aggregate amount covering the years 2005-2009. NextEra is reported to have paid a 1.74 percent tax rate over this period.

Taxes have been a focal lobbying point for many of these companies, but especially important for five of the six identified by Capitol IQ. Two of them—NextEra Energy and Xcel Energy—reported spending millions on lobbying while listing taxes on their disclosures more than any other issue in 2010. Xcel reportedly paid a 1.78 percent tax rate over the 2005-2009 period.

The teams assembled by NextEra and Xcel included lobbyists with years of tax experience, often on the appropriate congressional committees or in the executive branch. They include a former member of the Ways and Means Committee, a former tax counsel for the Ways and Means Committee, a former political advisor to Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, and a former tax counsel to the Senate Finance Committee.

In the fourth quarter of 2010, six out of the fifteen outside lobbying firms hired by NextEra and Xcel listed energy tax provisions as the sole issue they lobbied on. Six other firms lobbied on a mix of issues including taxes.

This fall the administration held meetings with alternative energy lobbyists including those from the low-tax rate NextEra and Xcel.

In October of last year Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the President on energy and climate change, held meetings with NextEra’s vice president for government relations, Christopher Chapel, the American Wind Energy Association’s Robert Gramlich, the Solar Energy Industry Association’s Dan Adamson, and the American Biofuels Association’s Michael McAdams and Jack Huttner. In January and September Zichal held meetings with Xcel Energy lobbyists John O’Donnell and Stephen Plevniak, respectively.

NextEra Energy and Xcel Energy are two of the largest producers and provides of wind power in the United States and both have major holdings of solar platforms.

Much of the reduced tax burden for these energy companies comes from a number of subsidies, grants, and tax credits that have been advanced since the 1990s and expanded under the Obama administration.

One of the favorite credits of the industry is the production tax credit, which provides a 2.1-cent per kilowatt subsidy for companies generating power from wind, solar, geothermal, and certain bioenergy sources. It’s estimated that NextEra saved $430 million under the production tax credit in 2010.

Equally important to alternative energy producers is the grant in lieu of tax credit program created in the stimulus bill. This program, administered by the Treasury Department, provides a 30 percent subsidy of capital costs to new construction for wind turbine construction. This has pushed NextEra and Xcel to speed construction before the program ends.

The increased construction associated with the application of credits and grants comes with an added benefit: much of the spending can be deducted from the company’s taxes.

Both NextEra and Xcel hired the majority of their outside lobbyists in the fourth quarter of 2010 to push for the extension of the grant in lieu of tax credit policy. They were quite successful. The tax reform compromise package worked out between the administration and congressional Republicans in December included an extension of this policy.

NextEra is uniquely situated to gain from the extension of this policy. NextEra subsidiaries won three grants under the program totaling $257 million, according to the Sun-Sentinel.

While these tax policies may appear to diverge from the administration’s stated goal of reducing lobbyist sought tax credits and loopholes they are likely to survive. Other companies with unusually low tax rates are more likely to see their hard won tax breaks and loopholes targeted by the administration and Congress if a corporate tax reform push comes to shove.

The ancient conundrum of whether it was the chicken  that came first or the egg, may always  be a mystery. But when it comes to technology and innovation, it seems like the two drive each other. Echoing President Obama's call for innovation in his State of the Union address, creative thinkers have developed new and engaging ways to not only inform the public on how the government operates, but also take the lead on making sure that their innovations are in user friendly formats.  One such example is the Transparencity project...

• The William Penn Foundation, together with Technically Philly are partnering on a project that will use technology and journalism to increase the availability and use of “actionable government data”. Codenamed Transparencity,  the project will provide extensive coverage of issues on city technology policy, the Division of Technology and government data sets. Take a look at how Christopher Wink and partners strive to increase Philadelphia’s use of data to inform on policy at Technically Philly.

• Social media enthusiasts Gangplank and PhxData are organizing a CityCamp to open government using the internet. The CityCampAZ will bring together programmers, developers and government officials to discuss ways in which they can enhance their digital presence on the web. Steve Jansen shares details about registering for the unconference and more on the Jackalope Ranch.

• Massachusetts has a new transparency website, but Laura Crimaldi, a board member of New England First Amendment Coalition, is not convinced that it will improve openness in government. Created in part to track state funding and local aid to cities, Massachusetts Transparency still has a long way to go in increasing citizens’ trust in government. Notably, Crimaldi sites that  Massachusetts’ judiciary and Legislature branches are still exempted from the state’s public records law. She explains this and more obstacles on The New England First Amendment Center.

• Residents of Seattle Washington now have a new personalized way of accessing government information. The city has launched My.Seattle.gov which will let users customize their Seattle.gov homepage using widgets that give them relevant information. In a press release posted on the West Seattle blog, the city’s mayor Mike McGinn, hoped that the new website will make government more accessible through technology. Read more on the West Seattle Blog.

• Phil West from North Carolina is making the case for why open government needs “data psychologists.” In his opinion, psychologists help determine the usefulness of data and how interesting it will be to the possible recipients before it is released to the public. He uses the example of Data.gov to show how it has evolved from just posting datasets with unfamiliar terms to ordinary citizens such as CSV files, to using methods that are more familiar to users including cataloging. Check out as he explains how data psychologists curate data usefulness on Sector Public.