New abilities given to citizens and open government watchdogs through the lens of technology means sunlight can be applied to government transparency in powerful ways. This past weekend, John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, spoke about open data and transparency at the slashroots ./roots/DEV in Jamaica. His keynote is embedded below.
./roots/Dev Conference 2011 – Keynote Day 2 Pt 1/2 from slashroots on Vimeo.
Last month, the Google Public Data Explorer went public. Today, Google added U.S. Census Bureau and state government finance statistics to the database, allowing everyone to gain new insight into our present.
The numbers may be beautifully displayed but they tell a grim tale when it comes to state budgets. The crisis in state budgets across the country will be the primary driver for the adoption of new approaches to governance and service delivery in 2011. If Gov 2.0 goes local, citizensourcing smarter government couldn’t come at a more timely moment.
The emergence of crisiscamps and subsequent maturation of CrisisCommons into a platform for civic engagement were important developments in 2010. Hearing digital cries for help has never been more important. A year after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, a new report by a team at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative analyzes how the humanitarian, emerging volunteer and technical communities collaborated in the aftermath of the quake. The report recommends ways to improve coordination between these groups in future emergencies. There are 5 specific recommendations to address the considerable challenges inherent in coordinating crisis response:
“Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies” was commissioned by the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership in collaboration with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). You can find more discussion of the report in a series of posts on disaster relief 2.0 at UNDispatch.com, like this observation from Jen Ziemke:
…a substantial majority of members on the Crisis Mappers Network have held positions in formal disaster response, some for several decades. Volunteers in groups like the Standby Task Force include seasoned practitioners with the UNDP or UN Global Pulse. But what is really needed is a fundamental rethinking of who constitutes the “we” of disaster response, as well as dispensing with current conceptions of: “volunteers”, “crowds,” and “experts.” While distinctions can be endlessly debated, as humans, we are far more the same than we are different.
Whether it’s leveraging social media in a time of need or geospatial mapping, technology empowers us to help one another more than ever. This report offers needed insight about how to do it better.
This past weekend, Syracuse MPA grad student Pat Fiorenza spoke about Gov 2.0 at the We Live NY Conference in upstate New York. In a wrap up posted after the conference, Fiorenza touched of what people think about when they hear “Gov 2.0,” including:
Fiorenza’s recap of his Gov 2.0 presentation also describes both why the idea is important to him and why it’s important to people who aren’t developers.
“Gov 2.0 extends beyond a great programmer – I’ve noticed that when I talk to some people about Gov 2.0 they immediately associate me as a geeky-computer programming-MPA student (only 2 of the 3!). I’ve developed a passion for Gov 2.0 because it holds so much potential for government. It’s about getting access to data and information immediately, improving constituent services, crowd sourcing information, and empowering citizens. Gov 2.0 requires someone to identify an existing problem and conceptualize a solution – then someone to run with the idea and develop the program, with a lot of collaboration in between.”
Fiorenza also pointed the way to Remy DeCausemaker (@remy_d, a “resident hacktivist and storyteller” at the Rochester Institute for Technology’s Lab for Technological Literacy, who also presented on Gov 2.0 at the conference.
DeCausemaker works on FOSS at RIT and CIVX, an open source public information system for raw data. His presentation (PDF) on open government and open data will be of interest to many people in the Gov 2.0 community.
Earlier this week, the White House convened an open government research and development summit at the National Archives. Columbia statistics professor Victoria Stodden captures some key themes from it at her blog, including smart disclosure of government data and open government at the VA. Stodden also documented the framing questions that federal CTO Aneesh Chopra asked for help answered from the academic community:
1. big data: how strengthen capacity to understand massive data?
2. new products: what constitutes high value data?
3. open platforms: what are the policy implications of enabling 3rd party apps?
4. international collaboration: what models translate to strengthen democracy internationally?
5. digital norms: what works and what doesn’t work in public engagement?
In the video below, former White House deputy CTO for open government, Beth Noveck, reflected on what the outcomes and results from the open government R&D summit at the end of the second day. If you’re interested in a report from one of the organizers, you’d be hard pressed to do any better.
The open government R&D summit has since come under criticism from one of its attendees, Expert Labs’ director of engagement Clay Johnson, for being formulaic, “self congratulatory” and not tackling the hard problems that face the country. He challenged the community to do better:
These events need to solicit public feedback from communities and organizations and we need to start telling the stories of Citizen X asked for Y to happen, we thought about it, produced it and the outcome was Z. This isn’t to say that these events aren’t helpful. It’s good to get the open government crowd together in the same room every once and awhile. But knowing the talents and brilliant minds in the room, and the energy that’s been put behind the Open Government Directive, I know we’re not tackling the problems that we could.
Noveck responded to his critique in a comment where she observed that “Hackathons don’t substitute for inviting researchers — who have never been addressed — to start studying what’s working and what’s not in order to free up people like you (and I hope me, too) to innovate and try great new experiments and to inform our work. But it’s not enough to have just the academics without the practitioners and vice versa.”
Justin Grimes, a Ph.D student who has been engaged in research in this space, was reflective after reading Johnson’s critique. “In the past few years, I’ve seen far more open gov events geared towards citizens, [developers], & industry than toward academics,” he tweeted. “Open gov is a new topic in academia; few people even know it’s out there; lot of potential there but we need more outreach. [The] purpose was to get more academics involved in conversation. Basically, government saying ‘Hey, look at our problems. Do research. Help us.'”
Johnson spoke with me earlier this year about what else he sees as the key trends of Gov 2.0 and open government, including transparency as infrastructure, smarter citizenship and better platforms. Given the focus he has put on doing, vs researching or, say, “blogging about it,” it will be interesting to see what comes out of Johnson and Expert Labs next.
What if open health data were to be harnessed to spur better healthcare decisions and catalyze the extension or creation of new businesses? That potential future exists now, in the present. Todd Park, chief technology officer of the Department of Heath and Human Services, has been working to unlock innovation through open health data for over a year now. On many levels, the effort is the best story in federal open data. Park tells it himself in the video below, recorded yesterday at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.
Over at e-patients.net, Pew Internet researcher Susannah Fox asked how community organizations can tap into the health data and development trend that Park has been working hard to ignite. She shared several resources (including a few from this correspondent) and highlighted the teams who competed in a health developer challenge tour that culminated at the recent Health 2.0 conference.
Check out this article about HealthData.gov including footage of Park talking about the “health data eco-system” at the code-a-thon (and actually, the video also features local health hacker Alan Viars sitting there at the right).
Here are 3 blog posts about last year’s event, including mine:
Making Health Data Sing (Even If It’s A Familiar Song)
Community Health Data Initiative: vast amounts of health data, freed for innovators to mash up!
Making community health information as useful as weather data: Open health data from Health and Human Services is driving more than 20 new apps.
The next big event in this space on June 9 at the NIH. If you’re interested in what’s next for open health data, track this event closely.
Innovations in democratic governance have been and likely always will be a global phenomenon. Samantha Power, senior director and special assistant for multilateral affairs and human rights at the White house, highlighted the ways in which platforms and initiatives for transparency in other countries are growing on the White House blog yesterday.
While “Sunshine Week” may be an American invention, the momentum for greater transparency and accountability in government is a global phenomenon. In countries around the world, governments and civil society groups are taking new and creative steps to ensure that government delivers for citizens and to strengthen democratic accountability.
From Kenya to Brazil to France to Australia, new laws and platforms are giving citizens new means to ask for, demand or simply create greater government transparency. As Power observed, open government is taking root in India, where the passage of India’s Right to Information Act and new digital platforms have the potential to change the dynamic between citizens and the immense bureaucracy.
Power listed a series of global transparency efforts, often empowered by technology, that serve as other useful examples of “innovations in democratic governance” on every continent
- El Salvador and Liberia recently passed progressive freedom of information laws, joining more than 80 countries with legislation in place, up from only 13 in 1990;
- A few weeks ago in Paris, six new countries from Europe, Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East met the high standards of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), empowering citizens with unprecedented information about payments made for the extraction of natural resources;
- Brazil and South Africa are pioneering innovative tools to promote budget transparency and foster citizen engagement in budget decision-making, along with tens of other countries that are making budget proposals and processes open to public input and scrutiny;
- Civil society groups are developing mechanisms to enable citizens to keep track of what happens in legislatures and parliaments, including impressive web portals such as votainteligente.cl in Chile and mzalendo.com in Kenya; and
- Experiments in citizen engagement in Tanzania, Indonesia, and the Philippines, are demonstrating that citizen efforts to monitor the disbursement of government funds for education, health, and other basic services, actually decrease the likelihood of corruption and drive better performance in service delivery.
There’s a long road ahead for open government here in the United States. While improving collaboration and transparency through open government will continue to be difficult nuts to crack, it looks like “Uncle Sam” could stand to learn a thing or two from the efforts and successes of other countries on transparency. Addressing FOIA reform and better mobile access to information are two places to start.
For more on how open government can have a global impact, click on over to this exclusive interview with Samantha Power on national security, transparency and open government.
Whether the White House can foster innovation through open government is up for debate. Last December, the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) emphasized the importance of establishing an R&D agenda for open government in a report.
This week in Washington, D.C., the National Archives is hosting an Open Government Research and Development Summit. Collaborative innovation in open government is a notion that goes back to Thomas Jefferson. Whether open models for science can lead to better outcomes in research in the 21st Century is the question of the day. You can follow the liveblog of the event below.
For more details, here are the organizing notes:
The summit will set the foundation for a robust R&D agenda that ensures the benefits of open government are widely realized, with emphasis on how open government can spur economic growth and improve the lives of everyday Americans. This will be the first opportunity for researchers, scholars, and open government professionals to begin a discussion that will continue at academic centers throughout the country over the next few years.”
Government innovators will talk about openness in the context of education, health, and economic policy, and international open government. Speakers include Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States.
Panelists made up of scholars, activists, and present and former policymakers will then discuss the important research questions that researchers must grapple with in order to ensure lasting success in the open government space. Panels will discuss issues such as how to safely release data without creating mosaic effects. Panelists include Jim Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Noshir Contractor (Northwestern University), Archon Fung (Harvard University), Chris Vein (U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer), Beth Noveck (New York Law School), and Susan Crawford (Yeshiva University).
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) are hosting this summit, with support from the MacArthur Foundation.
Workshop agenda: click here
Participant Information Packet: click here
Video of federal chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra is embedded below. [Editor’s Note: Apparently the way that iPhone 4 accelerometer interacted with the video meant that the video didn’t shift to landscape mode after the shift. Apologies to viewers, who may find this one better to listen to, unless you prefer to put the laptop or screen on edge.]
Part II:
As Sunshine Week comes to a close in Washington, OpenTheGovernment.org is hosting an event at the Center for American Progress on the Road forward for open government. Here’s the context for the event:
Two years ago President Obama committed his Administration “to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” Toward this end, the Administration has issued policy changes: a new Memorandum on Freedom of Information Act and Attorney General Guidelines, a new Executive Order (EO) on Classified National Security Information, and a new EO on Controlled Unclassified Information. To help meet the goal of embedding openness in the government, the Administration also has taken steps to make information more available and usable by the public, including setting up Data.gov andrequiring agencies to draw up plans to hard-wire openness into the way the government operates. Agencies have taken up the challenge, but more needs to be done.
Transparency experts from inside and outside of the federal government government are focusing upon how initiatives are being put into practice and what the next steps will be. You can watch the event live online at CAP or at OpenTheGovernment.org.
OMBWatch is presenting findings from a new report on assessing progress towards a 21st century right to know, embedded below:
The first panel, with David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, Steven P. Croley, Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy, White House Domestic Policy Council, and Gary Bass, Executive Director, OMB Watch, is focused upon the policy aspects of the Obama administration’s Open Government Initiative.
The second panel is focused upon the role technology plays in the way people get and use information, how the government is trying to fill that need, and the strengths and limitations of the Administration’s approach. Panelists include Jennifer LaFleur, Director of Computer-Assisted Reporting at ProPublica ; Tom Lee, Director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation; and Sheila Krumholz, Executive Director of the Center for Responsive Politics, and Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Earlier this week, United States CIO Vivek Kundra turned to the White House whiteboard to talk about sunshine, savings and service. If you’re unfamiliar with Kundra, he’s the man who has proposed and now is entrusted with implementing sweeping federal IT reform. One of the tools he’s been applying to the task is the so-called IT dashboard, which helps the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he serves to track IT spending. He claims to have reduced federal IT spending by some $3 billion dollars over the past two years with increased tracking and scrutiny.The federal CIO explains more about the results from that work, below.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/flash_media_player/player5x2.swf
UPDATE: As open data consultant Dan Morgan pointed out, however, the Government Accountability Office reported that while OMB has made improvements to its dashboard, “further work is needed by agencies and OMB to ensure data accuracy.”
…inaccuracies can be attributed to weaknesses in how agencies report data to the Dashboard, such as providing erroneous data submissions, as well as limitations in how OMB calculates the ratings. Until the selected agencies and OMB resolve these issues, ratings will continue to often be inaccurate and may not reflect current program performance. GAO is recommending that selected agencies take steps to improve the accuracy and reliability of Dashboard information and OMB improve how it rates investments relative to current performance and schedule variance. Agencies generally concurred with the recommendations; OMB did not concur with the first recommendation but concurred with the second. GAO maintains that until OMB implements both, performance may continue to be inaccurately represented on the Dashboard.
One question left unanswered: Is /good the new /open? Decide for yourself at the new “Good Government” section at WhiteHouse.gov.
E Pluribus Unum 