If information is power, the first step to gaining power is to get the right data. The Obama administration is a big proponent of opening up government data and making it digitally available. Today at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, the government’s new chief information officer Vivek Kundra announced USAspending.gov, a new site which launched today that tracks government spending with charts and lists ranking the largest government contractors (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc.) and assistance recipients (Department of Healthcare Services, New York State Dept. of Health, Texas Health & Human Services Commission, etc.). There is also the Data.gov project, which is attempting to digitize government data and make it available in its raw form for citizens and companies to sift through.
While Kundra agrees in principle that all public government data should be online, he also cautions that the reality is government data sits in more than 10,000 different systems, many of them written in COBOL or are still locked in dusty paper archives. But at least the government is starting to tackle the problem. The government collects a wealth of data, and the more accessible it becomes the more transparent government itself will be (not to mention the opportunities to startups which can tap into this data to offer new services). The State Department is also using the Internet, and Youtube specifically, to reach out directly to citizens of other countries every time Obama or Hillary Clinton travel abroad. They record video messages to citizens of other countries, which are distributed in multiple languages. Call it YouTube diplomacy.
In addition to releasing government data in digital form, the Obama administration is learning to listen to direct feedback from citizens through its Open Government initiative where people can suggest and vote on policy initiatives. These are then further refined and discussed on the Open Government blog and using tools such as wikis. Beth Noveck, the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, says the administration has gone from using the Internet to broadcast and amplify its message during the campaign to the realization that it can get information back as well, which it is trying to fold back into policy. She says, “What we’ve seen is enormously thoughtful suggestions that no small group of people in the White House could have come up with themselves.”
Digital tools are bringing participation back to democracy, or at least that is the idea. But once all of this data becomes free and new modes of influencing government policy are deemed to be effective, attempts to manipulate the data and game the system will emerge. Well-funded lobbyists and special interests will descend on these nascent institutions of “open government” like SEO consultants on Google. People from both sides of the aisle will also participate. Todd Herman, the GOP’s Director of New Media, admits as much. The GOP has learned from how the Obama campaign “changed the way community organizing works,” he says. The GOP’s failure in the last election was because “we did not use the tools” of digital organizing and outreach.
Speaking of SEO, Herman suggests that Democratic political activists are better than Republican ones at using SEO techniques to promote stories on Google News. He uses the example of the American Medical Association opposing Obama’s healthcare proposal and shows a screenshot of a Google News search where you wouldn’t know that was the case by scanning the headlines. He shows that as proof of the left’s SEO tactics, without really explaining how they are manipulating Google News. The problem with his example, is if you go to Google News right now and search for “AMA Obamacare” the top result is a Forbes story with the title “Will Doctors Buy Obamacare?” So maybe the Republican SEO experts are fighting back, or Google News is self-correcting.
What his comments reveal is the lengths to which political operatives and activists are going already to shape public opinion and policy online. They will do the same with open government because they are the most motivated and the most organized. The lobbyists and political parties have never suffered from a lack of data. The new open data initiatives will arm them further, but they will also arm regular citizens. If information is power, we might be about to see a leveling of the playing field.
Except there is one big problem: indifference. Most people will not do anything with that data. The ones who are most motivated to use the data about to be unleashed are exactly the special interests who run Washington today. They will use any new data or two-way policy mechanisms to further their own interests or those of their well-heeled clients. Do the rest of us stand a chance? Just because government is edging towards more openness doesn’t mean it can’t still be gamed. People will try.
Will the rest of us let them?
Correction: “Obama administration is a big proponent of opening up government data” should read “Obama administration gives significant lip service to opening up government data”
This administration is trying surpass even the previous one for it’s hideous expansion of government size and intrusion. Open is not equivalent to free.
100% correct
You can see the data yourself, which wasn’t available before. Click on the links above. Is that going to change anything though? That’s the question.
“Is that going to change anything though?” I think that’s the $10k question. USAspending.gov is great. They should be transparent about their analytics numbers and tell the world if anyone actually uses it after all the initial buzz wears off.
thumbs up David. you nailed it
So, it sounds like you’re just shilling Kundra.
Seriously, those of us who have been around the OpenGov stuff for awhile are also aware of the pitfalls and challenges. It’s good for the tech community to know as well, but I think it’s important to note that the system is not only open for gaming… it is already being gamed.
Spot on, Aaron. Even the chart offered by Erick as his central example gives huge evidence of data tampering: where do the interest payments on the national debt figure into the supposed breakdown of “all” federal government spending for fiscal year 2009 to date? The gaming just gets more intense when the information becomes more open. Caveat Emptor!
Great article Erick!
You put “all” in quotes but the chart does not say “all.” That’s your assumption. It’s obviously showing discretionary spending, which does not include entitlements like Medicare or Social Security, nor finance costs like bond payments (aka interest on the debt).
The biggest problem with open and transparent government is that most people do not understand government structure or jargon. For the most part the tech community ignores government. More detailed data is not necessarily going to fix that.
But hopefully it will lead to more posts and sites that in turn will educate people.
Agree with @Aaron… the Government is already being gamed, I’ll take my chances with openness.
I think you nailed it “Except there is one big problem: indifference.”
The challenge for startups/entrepreneurs is how to organize and engage citizens. Not sure if the data will help, but it’s a start.
I’m sure some shady individuals will try and sell this data even though it is freely available…like land/mortgage records, etc.
Is that really a question? It will be gamed by everyone from the gov’t trying to sell you on its ideas to lobbies to corporations… It is just good business…
David good point. But politicians are about nothing but gestures anyways; at least it won’t create too much evil this time around.
People need to begin demanding ownership of their citizenship ID and ID credentials. All that “Open Data” is your national treasure, why should non-citizens have access to it directly?
Open data should be usable data. The data our government possesses is owned by “We the People”… and “We the People” need to reformat that ownership equation so that we are contrived as owners at birth.
Your intellectual property, your health data, your school records, the context of your digital life… all of this and more should be owned by individuals at birth. You should own your citizenship.
Today your citizenship owns you.
Thus a government structure without accountability to its constituents that operates as if it were owned by the tools of its constituents… ie corporations.
Before we the people can recursively give our treasures to this good union of men, we own it.
Great post.
(Wow…. last time I looked at the feedburner it was only nearing 3k, now it’s 3.32k… impressive!)
“a new site which launched today that tracks government spending with charts and lists ranking the largest government contractors”
Sloppy, sloppy.
This might be painful to acknowledge, as it was implemented by the Bush Administration but USAspending.gov (along with all the features you describe) was launched in 2007 – mandated by a law passed in 2006 sponsored by Senators Coburn and Obama.
They “revealed” today a new feature to track IT spending and programs in greater detail across the Federal government.
i agree that openness will create its own set of problems but opennes is the way to go… now we are focusing on federal but i think there is a long way to go before the government puts up the kind of information that is usable for people to derive serious use out of it.
Open Government (sometimes called Gov 2.0) is still in its infancy. Is it perfect? No. Can it be gamed? Probably. But it is a start of a journey and we are learning about new ways to engage with citizens. Much like how companies like Craigslist, Ebay, and Facebook have evolved when dealing with spammers, gammers, etc – open government will evolve and learn and be adaptive. Open government is not the holy grail but a lot of good can comment out of it.
Steve Ressler
Founder, GovLoop.com
Just an FYI: modern versions of COBOL from IBM can read and write XML documents, so COBOL is no excuse for the data to remain locked up.
Meant to add: COBOL can read a “regular” file into a data area in memory and write an XML file from it.
The Open Government Data Working Group, founded by Tim O’Reilly, Larry Lessig, and others, some time ago met to discuss and release the baisc principles of what does indeed constitute the openness of government data. It will be easy to compare the policies of Data.gov with these principles, and check if they match up, or not.
http://www.opengovdata.org/
Creating openess in the political process is a slow process… the government has operated in certain ways for a long time…
I’ve been lobbying in Congress on the credit rating agency issue for several years and noticed that staff members didn’t have a way to share information on complex topics and operated as if they were info silos.
To help with the process of creating new regulations for the financial services industry I’ve been helping build an open source wiki covering the topics that will be legislated on…
It’s called Riski…
When I was last in Congress I got excellent response from Congressional staff members about Riski… they mainly get their information from lobbyists (bank lobbyists in this case) and welcome a place to have more neutral, open type information.
We are bound to make many mistakes with Riski… which is ok… we can make an effort to counterbalance the enormous influence of the vested interests in this debate…
The making and upkeep of democracy is messy… but we can try as citizens to preserve and protect our right to have free and open institutions…
Join us…
I have to say I disagree that people won’t use open government data in useful ways. We learned through running Apps for Democracy ( http://www.apps...ordemocrayc.org ) that developers in the DC area had some really great ideas for how to put government data to use.
NYC has also just announced an Apps for Democracy style contest (so has Finland and Belgium) call Big Apps and are looking for feedback into the kinds of data and apps should be included. You can submit those ideas here:
http://bit.ly/bigideas
Interesting and necessary article !!
Congratulations
joseafernandez
i agree that openness will create its own set of problems but opennes is the way to go… now we are focusing on federal but i think there is a long way to go before the government puts up the kind of information that is usable for people to derive serious use out of it.
Ok, they are over the drain now. But have they started to circle?