In the month since PublicMarkup.org launched, we've gotten 121 comments on our draft reform legislation, the Transparency in Government Act of 2008. The media and blog coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable, but not without a healthy dose of skepticism.
The main questions we've faced attempt to locate the bill within a traditional reform process: Who will sponsor it? When will it pass? What are its chances?
As I wrote when we started encountering these hesitations,
As it stands now, though, we're happy to not have all the answers about where the bill is going. Just like legislation itself, we're not pretending to know the best strategy for the bill, and we recognize that best ideas will be the ones that can benefit from a large community of experts and stakeholders.
Now that we've gotten some real feedback about the bill's provisions, we can make some decisions about how to advocate for the package's implementation. (more)
Continue readingOversight on the Office of Legal Counsel and Secrecy
After previewing it first, I attended last Wednesday’s Hearing by the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee about “Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government.”
For fuller coverage, see FireDogLake, the Guardian, ACS Blog, or the statements and testimony from the hearing (set off on the upper right).
While my coverage will be far from complete, I find the process of taking and then preparing my notes from committee hearings to be a great way to digest what was presented, and to start to work through some of the issues that relate to open government and accountability, which lie at the heart of this hearing. (more)
Senate Hearing on Secret Law
Tomorrow morning, the Senate Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government. In Chairman Feingold's words:
Senator Feingold is talking about memos put out by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a part of the Department of Justice. The executive branch needs guidance on how the law affects its actions, and the OLC exists to provide legal interpretations for rest of the executive branch. These opinions strongly determine the nature of executive branch activities, and therefore have an undeniable bearing on the public interest. (more)
Disclosure Responsibliity on Government in IG Reform
I'd like to elaborate on an important point about the IG reform measure that just passed the Senate.
The measure includes a requirement that the Inspectors General post their reports on their Web sites. This requirement places the responsibility of disclosure on the agencies themselves, rather than on citizens looking form information. The wording of the mandate takes the language of the Freedom of Information Act, which puts the onus on citizens to request information, and uses it to set a standard of full disclosure of IG reports.
That the government should take responsibility for openness, or make disclosure the rule rather than the exception, is one of Ellen's spotlight ideas; a completely open government would render FOIA unnecessary.
We're happy to see such a specific requirement pass the Senate in the spirit of full digital access.
The Inspector General of each agency shall...that is subject to release under...the Freedom of Information Act...post that report or audit (or portion of that report or audit) on the website of the Office of the Inspector General;
Continue reading
Mass of Attention
Boing Boing is quoting a talk by Clay Shirky on what they're calling the "cognitive surplus", or the amount of human thought not taken up by necessary pursuits. (I think I'd call it "discretionary cognition", for a financial comparison). They calculate the human-thought-hours taken up by wikipedia, and find:
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.
As we consider and build the tools that put political information online, we should remember that we're tapping into something unimaginably vast; we get to help shape the answer of the question "what would all of those people be doing if they weren't watching television?".
Even if only a small amount of that leisure time gets connected to politics and government online, and it is well connected to the substance of oversight and legislation, of politics and elections, then democracy is going to go through a fundamental change. TV can't compete, and the sheer amount of human attention moving online and getting involved in participatory media has enough weight to shift both politics and government. Even if one in 20,000 cares about a specific GAO report, that's enough to make a drastic change, assuming people's interests and abilities are led to those places where their attention matters. To those places where their attention is important, where they can have some effect, where they can add to their knowledge, or to where their knowledge can be helpful.
Continue readingIG Reform Passes Senate
Since coming across a CRS report on efforts to strengthen the Offices of Inspectors General (OIGs, and IGs), I've been interested in executive oversight structures and the laws that govern them. A section of PublicMarkup.org's Transparency in Government Act even covers IG report publication. It looks like the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and Congress are also intently focused on the issue, as they've just passed a second version of a measure to strengthen Inspectors General.
POGO's blog explains that the Senate just passed S. 2324 (GovTrack, OpenCongress), after, according to POGO,
For more background on IG reform, see especially POGO's February report, Inspectors General: Many Lack Essential Tools for Independence.
an amendment offered by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) finally broke through the logjam that had blocked the bill's passage since last November.
Senator Lieberman is among those praising the measure, which still needs to be reconciled with the House version before going to the President.
S. 2324 would amend Title 5 of the US Code, significantly strengthening the independence and effectiveness of oversight by IGs.
Of particular interest to Sunlight is the provision that Inspectors General post copies of IG reports to their Web sites, (as long as they're subject to FOIA, and therefore not classified or otherwise unfit for publication). The text: Continue reading
PublicMarkup.org at Web 2.0 Expo
We were delighted to hear that Tim O'Reilly brought up the Sunlight Foundation, and PublicMarkup.org in particular, during his keynote address to the Web 2.0 Expo (where you might be able to spot some Sunlight Labs staff, if you're attending).
Continue readingNew York Times Posts Original Documents
Via freegovinfo (via twitter), the New York Times has posted a story about the close relationship between media figures and the current administration.
From an information perspective, I'm impressed (again) by the New York Times development team, who has devised a way for a video news narrative to have original documentation pop up throughout the presentation. The viewer can proceed on a detour through each original document mentioned, perusing the document's content. The narration can then be restarted.
I often find myself trying to explain the connection between original verifiable sourcing and citizen journalists, whose work is often only validated by the sources it can point to. That's one reason I embed pdfs so often on this site (here, here); there are a ton of original documents that have a bearing on what we're working on, and I don't presume to have all of the answers about what they say.
Now the New York Times isn't making a move into full on citizen journalism (although that would be quite a story; if, say, they posted the entire results of their FOIA on governmentdocs.org). They are, however, showing a certain respect for the viewer's position as an information consumer who may want to verify or look for context. We'll take it, as a start. As James A Jacobs writes:
Together, the audio-visual presentation and the documents are a small model for how newspapers could be using the power of the web to enhance their coverage and utility. I would certainly like to see all 8000 pages online!
Agreed.
Continue readingAGA Financial Transparency Report
In February, the Association of Government Accountants released a report they commissioned Harris Interactive to create, entitiled Public Attitudes Toward Government Accountability and Transprency 2008.
The report and corresponding powerpoint presentation explain government's failure to effectively report on financial management:
A detailed survey and statistical and demographic explanations back up their conclusions on public perception of accountability and transparency: "Government at all levels is failing to meet the needs of its citizens with regard to financial management reporting. There is a large 'expectations gap.'"
While this survey applies specifically to financial reporting from the government, the conclusions are likely true across government. If traditional reporting mechanisms are failing, that leaves digital technology to help us develop mechanisms of real trust and accountability. See Section 3 of the report; What the Public Wants: "A significant portion of the population is searching online for information on how the government is generating and spending money."
(AGA Page, Survey Paper, Powerpoint Presentation )
(See also ACSI Reporting, Transparency in Healthcare reporting)
Continue readingGSA FACA Database and Reform
(from the Open House Project blog)
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee recently held a hearing on reforming the laws that govern the creation of Federal Advisory Committees. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) governs the creation and disclosure of advisory committees. This is no small legislative or logistical task, since there are about 65,000 people appointed to federal advisory committees. The issues surrounding this law are new to me, and I'm also excited to find that the General Services Administration (GSA) runs a database of Federal Advisory Committee information, available here, which includes advisory committee charters, members, transcripts, and other information.
While there doesn't appear to be any option to bulk download or API access, the database should be potentially combinable with other data sources, and should prove to be a rich collection of information, since people appointed to advisory committees are often business leaders or governmental employees, who have a stake in the subject matter they're advising on.
This situation presents a strong potential for conflicts of interest, which congress correctly responded to by instituting a disclosure regime, demanding transparency and accountability of the committees and their participants. The problem is that these disclosure requirements are far from perfect, and many loopholes exist that allow advisory committees to skirt the disclosure requirements. For FACA loopholes and reform ideas, see this GAO document, or this expert testimony from Sidney Shapiro, or this testimony from the GSA, who runs the FACA database.
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