Last week, my colleague John Wonderlich spoke on a panel about the nature of the Open Government Directive with other transparency leaders inside and outside of government. John commented that transparency needs a lasting structure in government so that it doesn't become a fad, a la breakdancing in the 80s. The White House's Norm Eisen responded that transparency would not be a fad and that "the project that the president is taking on is really a 17th century project that dates back to the founding of our democracy, which is a government for and by the people." Eisen is absolutely correct that the ideology of transparency traces its roots back to the founding of the Republic. There is a direct line that runs from the opening of the House of Representatives to the current transparency efforts that Sunlight and others are currently pursuing. This post is the beginning in a series looking at the history of transparency in the American federal government. (Much of this information is adapted from this previous project.)

“However firmly liberty may be established in any country, it cannot long subsist if the channels of information be stopped,” Massachusetts Senator Elbridge Gerry stated in his fierce defense of providing federal subsidies to newspaper postal distribution in 1792. Early on in the founding of the United States lawmakers recognized and debated the importance of maintaining an informed citizenry. In the debate where Gerry so strongly defended the importance of information flow Congress wound up adopting a policy to subsidize the postal delivery of newspapers to keep the public informed of the workings of their government.

During the same debate over postal policy, James Madison stated, “In such an one [government] as ours, where members are so far removed from the eye of their constituents, an easy and prompt circulation of public proceedings is peculiarly essential.”

In the small republic of the late-18th century, American politicians were seriously concerned with keeping their constituents directly informed of what transpired in the nation's capitol. Similarly, people were more than interested in obtaining information to express their opinions. The societal shifts that occurred in post-revolutionary America were an early precursor of the types of changes enabled by 21st century mass communications technology. Where we now have the means to express our opinions in almost instantaneous fashion that circumvents the old paths of discourse, ordinary people in the late-18th century all of a sudden found out that the barriers preventing them from expressing opinions at all no longer existed.

This began with the liberation of the people from a system of royalty, aristocracy and gentry. As Paul Starr paraphrases James Madison in The Creation of the Media, “liberty granted power in America.” That was power to the middle and lower classes who now, due to the liberty granted them, could voice their opinions on anything, including deriding the upper classes. In The Radicalism of the American Revolution Gordon Wood writes, “In contrast to pre-revolutionary America, the society of the early Republic had thousands upon thousands of obscure ordinary people participating in the creation of this public opinion.” Opinions crave for information.

Starr explains,

“Republican ideology held up a new standard of good conduct: The responsible citizen was informed and kept up with the times. Self-government, in other words, generated greater demand for information, particularly for news and newspapers. … [B]y legitimating the idea that ordinary people could govern themselves, the Revolution dignified their right to speak up—literally, without self-consciously bending and averting their eyes while addressing people of higher status.”

The House of Representatives opened their doors on the first day of their first session. As the only body then to have representatives directly elected by the people this openness policy seemed the perfect way to express the closeness of the body to the voting public. Rep. Alexander White of Virgina later wrote in his diary, “The pleasure which our open Doors, and the knowledge of our Debate obtained by the means, has given the People, can hardly be conceived.”

The Senate, however, remained obstinate and cloaked in aristocratic pretensions. Upon establishing itself, the Senate refused to open their doors, mirroring the policy of both the Roman Senate and the Constitutional Congress. This did not sit well with the newly liberated people of the country, particularly those organizing in Democratic-Republican clubs throughout the land. Between 1789 and 1791, the Virginia Assembly, the Maryland House of Delegates, the Pennsylvania Senate and the North Carolina Legislature all debated resolutions demanding the Senate doors be opened. During that same period of time, two attempts to pass legislation opening Senate doors failed by wide margins on the Senate floor.

Ultimately, it would take a massive press campaign, led by journalist Philip Freneau, before the doors of the Senate would swing open to the public.

In 1791, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Rep. James Madison recruited Freneau, a classmate of Madison at Princeton University, to head the anti-Federalist, pro-Republican newspaper, the National Gazette. Freneau immediately went to work covering the daily workings of Congress, writing that the paper would regularly publish a "brief history of the Debates and Proceedings of the Supreme Legislature of the United States." Freneau's decision to publish the records of Congress led him into direct confrontation with the Senate over their closed door policies. For nearly three years, and sparking two failed attempts to open Senate doors, Freneau railed against the "aristocratic junto," writing, "Secrecy is necessary to design and a masque to treachery; honesty shrinks not from the public eye." Facing financial troubles due to his unpopular support of a much disliked French foreign minister and the yellow fever epidemic that ran through Philadelphia, Freneau shuttered the National Gazette on October 27, 1793.

The efforts by Freneau, Madison and Jefferson to open the Senate's doors were both principled and political. These three, along with other legislators and printers, shared a starkly differing perspective on the direction that the United States should pursue. To them the Federalists were tyrannical, cloaked in secret societies and interested in crowning a king, not a president. The Senate represented these aristocratic pretensions and became an easy target for the rapidly organizing opposition to the Federalists in the communities of artisans, small businessmen and farmers. Just as many of the fights over procedure and openness today seem to be pursued out of partisan pique, this effort sought to discredit the Federalists and enforce the notion of their elitism.

At the outset of the 1794 Senate session, senators were forced to face their closed-door policy after the Federalists contested the seating of Sen. Albert Gallatin, born in Switzerland, for failing to meet the Senate's residency requirement. Supporters of an open door policy used the incident to advocate for temporarily opening the doors for the duration of the hearings of Gallatin's eligibility. As Gallatin was elected by the Pennsylvania Legislature, the Senate was put in a situation whereby they could be issuing a secret ruling against the will of the legislature. The Federalists in control knew that to deny the duly elected Senator a seat in secret hearings would prove politically dangerous and acquiesced to temporarily opening the doors.

During the debate over opening the Gallatin hearings, Senator Alexander Martin introduced a measure to permanently open the Senate's doors. After the open hearings contesting Gallatin's eligibility, Martin's measure found itself on the floor. Unlike previous attempts to pass a bill, this measure fell by only one vote. However, on a motion to reconsider, Vermont Senator Stephen Bradley switched his vote and brought three more northern senators with him to secure passage of the bill. Three months after Freneau's Gazette went silent, the Senate voted 19-8 to open their doors to the public at the beginning of the next session.

These early efforts to open government to the people relied on the simple revolutionary notion that ordinary people had an equal say in public life and deserved the information to craft informed opinions.  The policies enacted may seem rudimentary by our standards today, but postal travel and open congressional sessions provided the meat of the information that fed public opinion and public debate.

(Part II will pick up in the 19th century.)

This article in the New Republic by Lisbet Rausing takes a look at the future of libraries and knowledge and the obstacles preventing scholarly knowledge and research from reaching the wider public over the web. I'll just selectively quote below. The whole article is worth the read.

Look at JSTOR (if you can). There you find the evidence-based, source-critical foundations of sociology, anthropology, geography, history, philosophy, classics, Oriental studies, theology, musicology, history of science and so on. They are all closed to the public. It is wonderful, of course, that high-energy physics and string theory are open to all. But is it not ironic that we have opened the gates only to that scholarship which few professors, let alone members of the public, have the cognitive capacity and appropriate training to grasp?

The opportunity costs for society are self-evident. But what about the opportunity cost for scholars? For example, the public has set itself the task to rewrite knowledge for the public domain through Wikipedia and the like. Should not these sites be hyperlinked with JSTOR? By excluding the public from their scholarly literature, academics make it impossible for amateurs to use sound research methodologies, critically examining evidence by cross-referencing and source analysis. Scholars then critique the public’s output for not being sufficiently academic. Academics commonly refer to the occasionally wobbly scholarly standards of Wikipedia as proof the public does not wish to pursue scholarship. Might it not instead prove that they do not let them?

Forget, for the moment, about the morality of thus adding insult to injury. Consider instead the downside for the universities. Does not the professoriate take a reputational risk? After all, the web-tech community is working on how to verify information on the Web, or as they put it, “engineering layers of trust and provenance.” In the longer term, the question is not whether the Web will be scholarly in some perfectly meaningful sense. It is whether traditional twentieth-century scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences will be integrated into that emerging, increasingly cross-referenced and even more scholarly world of the web. Or will what James Boyle has nicely termed our cultural agoraphoria—our undue skepticism of open networks—lead the universities to become bystanders in the new worlds of open-access knowledge?

If scholars continue to hide away and lock up their knowledge, do they not risk their own irrelevance? An immediately important debate, I think, is to be had over how academics fail to engage with their natural constituency (and former students): journalists, business leaders, lawyers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and civil servants. These people are the ruling classes, if you would like. They are the ones who house and feed professors. Is it really in academics’ long-term interest to not let these well-educated and well-intentioned people as much as glance at, say, the Index of Christian Art? Is it really in their interest not to show the public their scholarly articles and academic monographs? What does this tell the public about who academics think is clubbable? And how will that affect how the public thinks about, say, federal research grants, or top-up fees?

Loudoun County in Virginia just launched a new wiki to collect community news and information. Loudounpedia is run by the Loudoun county library system and has sections for local government information, blogs, job board, recreation and other community related activities.

The government section now has all information regarding the election including a Google map of polling places. This is an excellent resource for the community and the choice of a wiki allows people to edit it with their own knowledge making it a resource that is owned by the community.

h/t to the Municipalist

Government Techonology reports on New York City's Open Source Solutions Lab at the City University of New York (CUNY).  The project is a collaboration with Intel and Red Hat to test open sources solutions for government information techonology. The goal of the project is to help provide New York City's public sector with the most cost-effective and flexlible technology for government needs. 

New York City deserves some praise for creating a resource to help move government to better information technology solutions.  This program, along with the Open Source Lab in Oregon, is helping government take steps to actually create software that meets the needs of agencies and can also create better resources for citizens.