This post was written by Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey. A version was cross-posted on Greater Greater Washington where Matt is a contributor. 

Washington, DC has a unique form of hyper local government.  Advisory Neighborhood Commissions  are psuedo-legislative bodies that represent neighborhood clusters and weigh in on a variety of local issues and provide constituent services. ANCs are made up of single member districts with each commissioner representing around 2,000 residents. There are currently 37 Commissions spread across the city.

The chairman of one of these commissions stole about $30,000 from his ANC last year. DC agencies struggle to provide enough oversight of dysfunctional ANCs. The District can start to increase accountability and transparency by making ANC financial reports available online.

ANCs must provide the DC Auditor with quarterly financial reports. The DC Auditor is responsible for auditing the financial information, maintaining a database of the information, and ensuring that the reports are in compliance.

It would be a small step to also make this information readily available to the public. The press and interested members of the public could then monitor the ANC financial reports and identify mistakes, omissions, and inconsistencies that may have been missed.

Under the current system, the DC government is not providing the resources required for adequate oversight. The size and scope of the ANC system outweighs the resources dedicated to overseeing it. The DC Auditor has many other responsibilities and the Office of Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, charged with administrating ANCs, only has two full-time staff members.

With financial information effectively hidden from the public, it takes extremely diligent individuals significant effort and time to uncover improper or missing information. In September 2011, the Washington Times discovered that the DC auditor approved ANC financial reports that were missing basic information, proper signatures, or evidence of tax deductions. The Times also reported that the Office of Advisory Neighborhood Commissions doesn't maintain records from the ANCs.

In the ANC 5B scandal, the DC Auditor initiated an audit after failing to receive financial reports for 3 consecutive quarters. The DC auditor currently posts a list detailing if and when ANCs submitted their financial reports.

If the database were available online, the public could have more easily and quickly found out about the DC Auditor's and the ANCs' failings, without having to rely on intrepid reporters sifting through hidden data.

Making this database available online should not place an undue burden on individual ANCs or the DC Auditor. But it will allow the press and public to better scrutinize these elected officials. Knowing that their records are easily available to the public may also encourage ANCs to follow proper financial procedure.

The ANC system is due for change. Putting these documents online would be a small step in the right direction.

The web has done a remarkable job at democratizing knowledge and creating the tools necessary for sharing and seeking out information for anyone with a web connection. From collaboration to creation to distribution, we're able to do much more with much less.

The idea of democratizing education has huge potential for reaching wide and diverse audiences at a fraction of the cost, side-stepping formal learning institutions. That's the beauty of a service like Skillshare. Say, for instance, you wanted to offer an open government course related to data scraping, services like Skillshare give you the opportunity to share your expertise by providing you with an audience to offer offline classes to without anyone having to go through a local community college to teach or sign up.

Whether you're an opengov policy wonk or a community organizer or a developer or social media analyst, you can find a forum and an audience to speak to and educate on the minutiae of your work. You're given freedom to engage your audience, leverage technologies to document and share your talks and to reach large audiences with few limitations.

So what is Skillshare exactly? Crunchbase gives a great summary of Skillshare, calling it "a community marketplace to learn anything from anyone. People can offer classes to others on any type of skill, from baking cupcakes to raising startup capital."

What is Skillshare? from Skillshare on Vimeo.

Similar services to Skillshare exist as well.  Knowledge Commons DC here in Washington, Brooklyn Brainery in NYC and Betterfly are three services that offer you the ability to teach, and learn.

If you're interested in learning as well, the sites mentioned above are great.  You can also check out the Khan Academy, MITx and iTunes U.

Last week, I blogged about a somewhat unusual event going down this Wednesday: DC Arts Advocacy Day. It’s an event close to home for Sunlight, but our participation is far from sentimental. The DC Advocates for the Arts, who put on Arts Advocacy each year, have a clear stance that increasing government transparency is part of their vision for long-standing changes to the the government works with and supports artists. Here’s an excerpt from their Advocacy primer from last year:

We ask that the District make public the programming and granting program budgets for Arts and Humanities support in the District, and encourage public input in any revisions of those programs.

Sunlight is one of 15 other local groups partnering with the DC Advocates for the Arts for this event because we support their call for budgetary transparency. If you’re a local and you’re interested in showing your support for open government in the District, please join us at the event tomorrow. At noon, we’ll be gathering in front of the John A. Wilson Building to hear from arts and transparency advocates -- and might event get to take in some surprise entertainment. I’ve posted a recap of the details below.

Hope to see you there!

DC Arts Advocacy Day

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Public Gathering & Statements: 12PM - 1PM

John A. Wilson Building (the District’s city hall)

Full disclosure: I've received funding from the DC Commission for the Arts & Humanities and sit on the board of the DC Advocates.

Here at the Sunlight Foundation mothership, when we talk about local, we tend to be talking about the issues faced by folks outside of the Beltway - challenges close to home that you’re tackling in New Hampshire, Utah, and elsewhere. But, given that we’re based in DC, we’re not exempt from paying attention to transparency issues that happen close to our home, either.

Take, for instance, the recent events that went down at a public meeting on Wednesday. Two reporters were arrested by US Park Police officers (!) at a Taxi Commission meeting: the first, Peter Tucker of thefightback.org, for taking photographs. The second, Reason TV’s Jim Epstein, for video-taping the arrest of the first.

Officers were directed to make the arrests by a member of the Commission’s staff. The Washington Post’s Mike DeBonis and John Kelly report that,

Earlier in the meeting, Tucker said, [interim chair of the Taxi Commission, Dena] Reed objected when he placed a microphone near her seat; he was told to place it some distance away. Previous commission meetings, he said, have included signs notifying attendees that no photographs [sic] or recordings are allowed.

Despite reports (and video) that Tucker and Epstein did nothing to disturb the meeting, the two men were arrested for “disorderly conduct and unlawful entry”...”Unlawful entry” of a public meeting. Business Insider reports that the reporters could be sentenced to nine months in jail and $1,250 in fines. All this, again, for recording a public meeting.

Sadly, DC is not among the states included in this incredible resource from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of Press that lists every state’s open records and meeting’s laws, but you can read the law that’s on DC’s books here: D.C. Open Meetings Act. As Debonis and Kelly note, although the law requires meetings of governmental bodies to be open to the public, it does not specifically address whether photographs or video recordings are permitted.

Public meetings are a big open government issue all around the country: You can’t get more basic transparency than having one’s government literally open the doors to let citizens in to listen to its dealings. But Tucker and Epstein’s experience highlights an important tension between government and technology: Not everyone can take time off to attend meetings of interest. Making public meetings truly accessible to the public means putting record of it online where the public can access it with as much detail (and data) as possible. The DC law may not explicitly provide for this level of public accessibility, but that doesn’t meant that they should throttle attempts by members of the press or public to do so.

Take a look for yourself at the arrests of the reporters below. We’ll post an update when there’s more news.

This year has seen more attention than ever given to transparency - most focused on the White House and federal government.  That's no surprise given the years of "rain-checked" reforms.  Change is needed at a fast pace and in more areas.  But the pressure to deliver extends beyond Washington DC.  State legislatures across the country are starting to reexamine their own data, transparency rules and regulations. Earlier this month, Minnesota legislative staff met with department heads, IT experts and non-profit leaders to discuss possible changes.

The state legislature in Minnesota finds itself in a challenging situation. Engaged citizenry who are clamoring for more access, more data and a better user interface for the legislature’s web site versus a state budget that has been cut down to the bone by massive state deficits as far as the eye can see.

Legislative staff see the need for additional transparency and real time data but are challenged to deliver with scarce financial resources on one hand and a deeply federated departmental system on the other.  Politicians are loathe to legislate unfunded mandates (or a funded one for that matter).

Let’s be clear though: if introducing data standards and increasing transparency costs government more in the long run - they’re doing it wrong.

Dan McCreary, Semantic Solutions Architect at Syntactica in Minneapolis, attended the meeting with legislative staff.  McCreary estimates that “$100 million per year in Minnesota alone” could be saved if the legislature adopted “National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) standards for all statewide data exchanges."  NIEM standards are developed jointly by the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

Donna Roy, Chair of the NIEM National Priority Exchange Panel says the "[Minnesota] Department of Public Safety anticipates saving over $10 million over a three-year period by using the XML Data Model rather than developing its own statewide standard for information systems."  That's just one change in one department!  If state legislatures can save money by sharing information between departments they can definitely find the money to share that information with the public.

State legislators need to start seeing transparency as improving service while cutting costs. Without the grassroots backing strong legislation, change will be slow or non-existent in Minnesota.

I'll be diving deeper into the transparency movement in Minnesota in future posts.  Tell me about your challenges or success stories in getting data out of the legislature.  Comment below or reach me on Twitter @noahkunin.