Cato study rating Congress on open legislative data gives low grades for transparency

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The school year may have just begun but Congress has already received an early report card on the transparency of its legislative data. The verdict? A 2.47 GPA, on average, if you don’t include the 4 Incompletes. That’s on average a bit better than a C+, for those who’ve long since forgotten how grade point averages are computer. It also means that while Congress “passed this term,” any teacher’s note would likely include a stern warn that when it comes to legislative transparency, the student needs to show improvement before graduation.

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Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, analyzed the “Publication Practices for Transparent Government” and found it a bit, well, wanting.

If you’re interested in opening up the United States federal legislative system, you can tune into a livestream of special DC forum this morning where Harper and other open government stakeholders “rates Congress. Brandon Arnold, director of government affairs at the Cato Institute, will moderate a discussion between Harper, Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation.

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A better data model

The Cato paper analyzes Congressional achievement through the lens of four basic concepts in data publication: authoritative sourcing, availability, machine-discoverability, and machine-readability. “Together, these practices will allow computers to automatically generate the myriad stories that the data Congress produces has to tell,” writes Harper in a blog post today. “Following these practices will allow many different users to put the data to hundreds of new uses in government oversight.

That data model used to produce this analysis should be of interest to the broader open government data community, in terms of a good matrix for rating a given legislature. “Data modeling is pretty arcane stuff, but in this model we reduced everything to ‘entities,’ each having various ‘properties,’ explained Harper. “The entities and their properties describe the logical relationships of things in the real world, like members of Congress, votes, bills, and so on. We also loosely defined several ‘markup types’ guiding how documents that come out of the legislative process should be structured and published. Then we compared the publication practices in the briefing paper to the ‘entities’ in the model.”

While the obvious takeaway is that Congress could do better, Harper gives the Senate and House due credit and time to improve. “This stuff is tough sledding,” he allowed. “The data model isn’ the last word, and there are things happening varied places on and around Capitol Hill to improve things. Several pieces of the legislative process nobody has ever talked about publishing as data before, so we forgive the fact that this isn’t already being done. If things haven’t improved in another year, then you might start to see a little more piquant commentary.”

USAID goes FWD with open data and open government

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Today at the Social Good Summit, Dr. Raj Shah, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will launch a new public engagement effort to raise awareness about the devastating famine in the Horn of Africa. USAID is calling it the “FWD campaign” and it includes some interesting uses of open data, mapping and citizen engagement. USAID launched USAID.gov/FWD today and a text to donate initiative up and running in time to be amplified by the reach of Mashable’s Social Good Summit. You can txt “GIVE’ to 777444 to donate $10.

FWD stands for “Famine, War, Drought,” the unfortunate combination that lies behind the crisis in the Horn of Africa. “It also stands for our call to action,” writes in Haley Van Dyck, director of digital strategy at USAID, with an eye to getting people involved in raising awareness and “forwarding” the campaign on to friends, family and colleagues. Each of the components of the page includes the options to share on Twitter, Facebook or “FWD” on to people using email.

“Frankly, it’s the first foray the agency is taking into open government, open data, and citizen engagement online,” said Van Dyck. “We recognize there is a lot more to do on this front, but are happy to start moving the ball forward. This campaign is different than anything USAID has done in the past. It is based on informing, engaging, and connecting with the American people to partner with us on these dire but solvable problems. We want to change not only the way USAID communicates with the American public, but also the way we share information.”

Van Dyck was particularly excited about the interactive maps that USAID has built and embedded on the FWD site. The agency built the maps with open source mapping tools and published the data sets they used to make these maps on data.gov.

The combination of publishing maps and the open data that drives them simultaneously online is significantly evolved for any government agency and will serve as a worthy bar for other efforts in the future to meet. They’ve done that by migrating their data to an open, machine-readable format. In the past, we released our data in inaccessible formats – mostly PDFs — that are often unable to be used effectively, wrote Van Dyck.

“USAID is one of the premiere data collectors in the international development space,” wrote Van Dyck. “We want to start making that data open, making that data sharable, and using that data to tell stories about the crisis and the work we are doing on the ground in an interactive way.”