Tag: Government transparency
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Government Shouldn't "Help" Citizens Pick Tough Questions for Obama
A couple of weeks ago, Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica, Ben Smith at Politico and others noted a disturbing pattern on the incoming Obama administration’s Change.gov website: polite but pointed user-submitted questions about the Blagojevich scandal and other potentially uncomfortable topics were being flagged as “inappropriate” by other visitors to the site. In less than…
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Election Transparency Project Finds Ballot-Counting Bug
Yesterday, Kim Zetter at Wired News reported an amazing e-voting story about lost ballots and the public advocates who found them. Here’s a summary: Humboldt County, California has an innovative program to put on the Internet scanned images of all the optical-scan ballots cast in the county. In the online archive, citizens found 197 ballots…
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Could Too Much Transparency Lead to Sunburn?
On Tuesday, the Houston Chronicle published a story about the salaries of local government employees. Headlined “Understaffing costs Houston taxpayers $150 million in overtime,” it was in many respects a typical piece of local “enterprise” journalism, where reporters go out and dig up information that the public might not already be aware is newsworthy. The…
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Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law
James Grimmelmann has an interesting new essay, “Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law,” on the challenges of ensuring that the public has effective knowledge of the laws. This might sound like an easy problem, but Grimmelmann combines history and explanation to show why it can be difficult. The law – which includes both legislators’…
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New bill advances open data, but could be better for reuse
Senators Obama, Coburn, McCain, and Carper have introduced the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008 (S. 3077), which would modify their 2006 transparency act. That first bill created USASpending.gov, a searchable web site of government outlays. USASpending.gov—which was based on software developed by OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation—allows end users…
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Government Data and the Invisible Hand
David Robinson, Harlan Yu, Bill Zeller, and I have a new paper about how to use infotech to make government more transparent. We make specific suggestions, some of them counter-intuitive, about how to make this happen. The final version of our paper will appear in the Fall issue of the Yale Journal of Law and…