Tools for Open-Access Government: Wikis, Search Engines, Databases

This week saw good news and new thinking on the power of technology to foster open and accountable governance.

“New technology may be changing the relationship between democracy and expertise, affording an opportunity to improve competence by making good information available for better governance, ” wrote Beth Simine Noveck in presenting possibilities for “Wiki-Government” in the latest edition of Democracy (via cairns).

In a related post, Noveck points to a recent report from the Center for Democracy and Technology and OMB Watch on the difficulty (or often, impossibility) of using major Internet search engines to find government information, despite the requirements of the E-Government Act of 2002.

But at least one government agency is moving forward to make useful data available to the public through the Internet. USASpending.gov provides detailed information on where Federal budget dollars go, and allows queries for contractors and the recipients of agency grants. The site also includes an API for developers and tech-savvy citizens to retrieve data dynamically and manipulate it in ways unanticipated by the authors of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, the legislation that initiated the project. The site is a collaboration between OMB Watch, and the Office of Management and Budget, with support from the Sunlight Foundation (via the Sunlight Foundation blog).

Tags: funding, open access

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