Dispatch from Transparency Camp: The Tech-Savvy Push for Open Government Can’t Lose Sight of Public Policy Goals

The government transparency movement is waiting for a deluge of public data from Congress and the Obama administration. Developers are ready with open-source software and protocols for structuring data on everything from lobbying disclosures to pending legislation to stimulus allocations. And once the data is free and flowing through RSS feeds, Application Programming Interfaces, and Twitter messages, others are poised to mash it up in visualizations, plot it on Google maps, and ferry it out for discussion with social networking tools.

But as the Washington Post reports today, the administration isn’t moving fast enough for the transparency community, and the reason isn’t technological; it’s operational. That is, the new media team at the White House, which is currently taking a lot of the heat on transparency issues, knows what technology it needs and how to use it to share info about what President Obama is doing and to solicit citizen input on policymaking. But there are operational issues built into the 20th-century rules that govern how executive offices can—and cannot—post information online.

The lesson that the first issue in transparency isn’t technology, but rather operations, isn’t trivial. How do you break down the red tape to allow discussion of unfinalized agency decisions on official blogs? How you dedicate staff and resources to maintain the quality and accuracy of complex technical data? How do you do build the concept of transparency into the DNA of a department when many have spent the last two terms operating behind an executive-mandated veil? These sort of questions have to come before a decision on what sort of markup language is right for the data or how a discussion board for regulations rules will thread comments.

Over the weekend, a few hundred developers, new media strategists, government information experts, and technology advocates converged on George Washington University for the first Transparency Camp, a BarCamp-style “unconference” designed to drive the discussion about how to get the federal government to open up and put its information online. In a discussion early Saturday, technology guru and O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly posed the fundamentals like this: “What are the most basic primitives for open government?” To put it another way, where do we start before we get into software specs? The difference between operations and technology will be crucial as advocacy groups continue to work with federal agencies as the latter open their data and the former start to analyze it.

The second issue that must inform effective transparency policy is that it must shape good public policy outcomes. Transparency is, in and of itself, an important principle in progressive governance, but the technologies that will enable radical transparency are not themselves policy solutions. Transparency has to work in the service of larger public policy goals: improving access to affordable health care, preventing environmental degradation, and reducing inequalities in the education system, to name a few.

The onus is on the advocacy groups to take federal data, analyze it, and create compelling arguments for public policy changes. That loop running from open government data to compelling projects that influence policy changes and back to more open data is what will drive future sectors of the government to open up and future advocacy groups to innovate.

So what do we need first? Many discussions at Transparency Camp boiled it down to this: structured data. Too many arms of the government lock their data in pdfs, text files, scanned images, or difficult-to-navigate databases. At another panel, O’Reilly recommended that the systems to start overhauling first are the ones that developers are already scraping and scouring for information, like the THOMAS database that houses information about Congressional legislation. Notoriously hard to query, the main page of the site currently has a link at the top directing visitors to the stimulus bill—because it’s that hard to find. “Follow the alpha geeks,” O’Reilly said. If they’re already hacking a site, then maybe it’s time to build them an API to give them access to the information inside.

After people have the data and the tools to access it, the next priority will be effective case examples borne of collaboration between advocacy groups and federal agencies opening up their processes and information. To be sure, some of these collaborations will fail, and that’s okay; smart groups will take the lessons learned and apply them to the next effort. But if the nonprofit community simply comes to the government demanding transparency, gets it, and there are no identifiable public policy reforms that benefit the people on main street, then there won’t be continued momentum on the issue to warrant future collaboration.

The potential of radical transparency for government data is immense, but at the same time, there’s an analog to the current state of genetics research: in both arenas, we have huge amounts of data with only a limited number of effective interpretations we use to make informed decisions.

It’s hard to communicate the energy and potential of this tech-savvy community—it’s also hard to predict just how transparency with change the way government and citizens interact. Yet as SP contributor Nancy Scola argued at TechPresident, it’s the end of transparency camp, but the beginning of what’s next.

Images: flickr.com/Avelino_Maestas and flickr.com/justgrimes

Tags: open-government, transparency

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