Tag Archives: Gov 2.0

Open government data gathers bipartisan support in Washington

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Two weeks ago at the Strata Conference in NYC, I donned a headset, grabbed a tablet worth of questions and headed to the podium to talk with the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about data and open government.

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) joined me via remote webcast from chambers in Washington, D.C. Our crack video team is working on an improved version of this video in which you’ll see my side of the broadcast, along with a boost in audio. Until then, the video that the House Oversight digital team uploaded to YouTube will suffice — and I don’t want to wait to share this story any longer in the meantime, particularly as interest builds behind the principle subject of our conversation, a proposed bill to standardize financial reporting data standards in the federal government and create single database for financial spending.

Daniel Schuman listened in and summarized our conversation on open government data over at the Sunlight Foundation’s blog:

The Chairman focused his remarks on the DATA Act, the bipartisan legislation he introduced that would transform how government tracks federal spending and identifies waste, fraud, and abuse.

He emphasized the importance of making government data available online in real time so that innovative minds can immediately make use the information to build their own businesses. Business, in turn, would help the government identify program mismanagement and data quality problems. The Chairman specifically singled out Vice President Biden as a supporter of efforts to find a common solution to make data available in a systematic way.

…Chairman Issa explained that the private sector must step up as advocates for greater openness because they will benefit from building and using the tools made possible by greater transparency. He added when government drives down the cost of obtaining information, private individuals will derive value from the analysis of data, not its ownership.

The cost of good data

Since our conversation, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the DATA Act would cost the government $575 million to implement over 5 years, as reported by FierceGovernmentIT:

“In a cost estimate dated Sept. 16, the CBO attributes $325 million of the estimated total to requirements in the bill regarding the collecting and reporting of financial information. The DATA Act would require federal agencies, and most government contractors and grant award winners to adopt XBRL as a financial data reporting mechanism.”

Left unsaid in the CBO estimate is what the impact of this kind of transparency on the federal government’s finances might be, in terms of savings. House Oversight staff have estimated annual savings from standards and centralized spending database that would more than offset that outlay, including:

  • $41 million in funds recovered from questionable recipients
  • $63 million in funds withheld from questionable recipients
  • $5 billion in savings recommended by inspectors general
  • unknown savings resulting from better internal spending control and better oversight by Congressional appropriators.

The DATA Act, which would expand the role of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to track all federal spending and make all of the information available to the public, has bipartisan support in the Senate from Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), who has introduced a companion bill there.

As NextGov reported yesterday, efforts to require government-wide spending reports have advanced on the Hill, while President Obama has begun the process of establishing a similar board by executive order.

You can read more letters of support that extend from well beyond an Open Government Coalition online over at Scribd, including:

Open government as a bipartisan issue

Given the White House’s embrace of the mantle of open government on President’s first day in office, the executive branch has gathered a lot of the press, attention, praise, scrutiny and criticism in this area.

That looks to be changing, and for the better. As Clay Johnson pointed out at the beginning of 2011, any competition between the White House and Congress on open government is likely to be a win for the American people.

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Foundation and webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com, wrote then that the GOP can eclipse Obama on transparency. “House Republicans can quickly outshine Obama and the Democratic Senate,” he opined. “It all depends on how they implement the watch phrase of their amendment package: “publicly available in electronic form.”

The GOP House leadership must make sure that this translates into real-time posting of bills, amendments and steps in the legislative process, in formats the Internet can work with. It’s not about documents anymore. It’s about data. Today’s Internet needs the data in these documents.

There are no technical impediments to a fully transparent Congress. Computers can handle this. The challenges, however, are institutional and practical.”

Johnson identified the moment in history as an important inflection point, and one that, if the White House rose to the challenge, could legitimately be seen as an open government win for the American people and a smarter, more accountable government.

The White House may hold the considerable advantages of the bully pulpit and the largest followings of any federal entity or politician on Twitter, for now, but that has to be balanced against the considerable new media prowess that the GOP has built up over their Democratic counterparts in Congress, where Republicans hold an edge on social media.

While some projects or choices continue to cast questions on commitment in the rank and file to open government principles, with the GOP bending new House rules, there’s progress to report. The leadership of the House of Representatives has supported the creation of open, online video archives, like House.Resource.org. The House revamped its floor feed recently, adding live XML. And House leadership has recently venerated the role of technology in making Congress more transparent, engaged and accountable.

Rep. Issa, in particularly, appears to have taken on open government as a cause and, for the moment, its rhetoric. He even tweets using the #opengov hashtag. When it comes to the legislature, “the American people have a right to all the data from Congress. They have a right,” he said at a recent forum on Congressional transparency, as reported by Diana Lopez.

Government secrecy and transparency are, in theory, non-partisan issues. In practice, they are often used a political bludgeons against an opposing party, particularly by a partisan minority, and then discarded once power is gained. For government transparency to outlast a given White House or Congress, laws and regulatory changes have to happen.

Open government has to be “baked in” to culture, practices, regulations, technology, business practices and public expectations. Needless to say, that’s going to take a while, but it looks like both the administration and some members of Congress are willing to keep trying.

As these efforts go forward, it will be up to the media, businesses, nonprofits, watchdogs and, of course, citizens to hold them accountable for actions taken, not just rhetoric.

What’s the future of the DATA Act?

I’m writing a feature article about the bill, this conversation, context for government performance data and whether open government and transparency will have any legs in the upcoming presidential campaign.

If you have any questions that are unanswered after watching the conversation, comments about the use of XBRL or perspective on the proposed law’s future in Congress, please ring in in the comments or find me at alex[at]oreilly.com.

How should Regulations.gov be using social media?

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The Internet offers new opportunities to involve the public in regulatory rulemaking, including industry, media, nonprofits and citizens. A new social layer for the Web has shifted what’s possible in open government forward again, both hosting and enabling conversations. Below, one of those conversations is captured using the social media curation tool, Storify.

http://storify.com/digiphile/how-should-regulationsgov-be-using-social-media.js[View the story “How should Regulations.gov be using social media?” on Storify]

White House and House GOP turns to the Web to discuss jobs

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It’s a tale of two parties, two social networks, live events and high stakes: creating jobs in an American economy still struggling to come out of recession. Would the American Jobs Act, introduced by President Obama earlier this month, make a difference? Can the White House or Congress do anything to create jobs, aside from directly hiring more government workers for infrastructure projects or similar initiatives? The American people will have the opportunity to hear from both sides of the aisle today and judge themselves, starting at 2 PM EST when the president will participate in a town hall hosted at LinkedIn in California.

UPDATE: Archived video from President Obama’s LinkedIn townhall is embedded below:

Notably, there will still be a live chat on Facebook at a LinkedIn townhall, along with a public “backchannel” at the #meetopportunity hashtag on Twitter.

This is the second time that the White House experiments with LinkedIn for questions, following a forum earlier this year with tech CEOs and federal CTO Aneesh Chopra. The questions are pulled from a “putting America back to work forum on LinkedIn.com. As I’ve observed before, the platform isn’t ideal for ideation and moderation of questions but LinkedIn is unquestionably targeted towards employment.

Personally, I’d like to see CEO Jeff Weiner crunch the big data the social network has collected about job openings and the skills and degrees that high school and college grads currently have. Programs and policies oriented towards matching the two would be an interesting direction.

UPDATE: Here are the questions that were asked:

UPDATE: Below is a “storified” tweetstream from the event:

[<a href=”http://storify.com/deborapetersen/obama-at-linkedin” target=”blank”>View the story “Obama and Linkedin” on Storify]</a>
 

House GOP Leaders discuss technology, transparency and jobs

At 6 PM EST, the leaders of the Republican caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives will also host an online townhall, though they’ll be doing it on Facebook Live. The event will feature House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy of California and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will moderate.

Prior to today’s event, the House GOP leaders participated in a discussion about the role social media and technology now plays in government with Politico’s senior White House correspondent, Mike Allen. Video is below:

In the interview, the House GOP’s “Young Guns” spoke at length about the role that new social and mobile technology plays in the work of Congress and government, touching upon many subjects that will be of interest to the open government community.

Such interest is hardly new — the new GOP majority came into the House with promises to embrace innovation and transparency— but given the importance of open government, it’s a useful reminder that open government is a bipartisan issue.

If you have thoughts or comments on either of the town halls or the discussion above, please share them in the comments.

UPDATE: The archived video of this congressional “Facehall” is embedded below:

UPDATE: A Storify of my own tweets during the event is embedded below:

[<a href=”http://storify.com/digiphile/house-gop-leaders-join-sheryl-sandberg-for-faceboo” target=”blank”>View the story “House GOP leaders join Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook townhall” on Storify]</a>

Vivek Kundra talks open government and data journalism at ONA 2011

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Earlier today, Vivek Kundra, the first CIO of the United States, visited the Online News Association. Here’s a Storify of the tweetstream from his talk by Cristina F. Pereda.

http://storify.com/onewayoranother/vivek-kundra-ex-director-de-informacion-y-tecnolog.js[View the story “Vivek Kundra, ex director de Información y Tecnología” on Storify]

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.”