Tag: Government transparency

Like many others who read this blog, I’ve spent some time over the last year trying to get more civic data online. I’ve argued that government’s failure to put machine-readable data online is the key roadblock that separates us from a world in which exciting, Web 2.0 style technologies enrich nearly every aspect of civic…

Under most circumstances, government spending is slow and deliberate—a key fact that helps reduce the chances of waste and fraud. But the recently passed Recovery Act is a special case: spending the money quickly is understood to be essential to the success of the Act. We all know that shoppers in a hurry tend to…

These days everybody in Washington seems to be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. The latest jumpers are four House committees, according to Tech Daily Dose. The committees, like a growing number of individual members’ offices, plan to use Twitter as a new tool to reach their audience and ensure transparency between the government and the…

Today, the Obama administration named Vivek Kundra as the Chief Information Officer of the U.S. government, a newly created position. This is great news. Kundra, in his previous role as CTO of the District of Columbia, made great strides in opening the DC government by publishing government data. When he spoke at our Thursday Forum…

Thanks to the hard work of our patient editors at the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, my coauthors and I can now share the final version of our paper about online transparency, Government Data and the Invisible Hand. If you have read the first version, you know that our paper is informed by a…

USACM is the Washington policy committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, the professional association that represents computer scientists and computing practitioners. Today, USACM released Policy Recommendations on Open Government. The recommendations offer simple, clear advice to help Congress and the new administration make government initiatives—like the pending recovery bill—transparent to citizens. The leading recommendation…

Some of my colleagues here at CITP have written about the importance of open data formats for promoting government transparency and achieving government accountability. Another leading thinker in this area is my friend Jerry Brito, a George Mason University scholar who contributed a post here at Freedom to Tinker last year. Jerry wrote one of…

The next piece of proposed bailout legislation is called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Chris Soghoian, who is covering the issue on his Surveillance State blog at CNET, brought the bill to my attention, particularly a provision requiring that a new web site called Recovery.gov “provide data on relevant economic, financial, grant,…

In my last post, I argued that sifting through citizens’ questions for the President is a job best done outside of government. More broadly, there’s a class of input that is good for government to receive, but that probably won’t be welcome at the staff level, where moment-to-moment success is more of a concern than…