Using openness to improve government transparency

John Moore, who recently wrote about Gov 2.0 for Fortune Magazine, asks the internet what the biggest obstacle to local transparency is.

Moore tries a new crowdsourcing program, Quora, to collect answers. And the answers are all insightful, and come from interesting sources:

Douglas Barnes, Attorney: “The real problem is when there is strong institutional resistance or even hostility towards greater accountability to the public.”Take the NYPD (please). Their policy on FOIL requests? Drop them on the floor until you litigate. Providing data for timely crime mapping or community alerts? No way. The data and the technology is all there — after all, what do you think is driving CompStat? But god forbid the public would ever be brought into the loop in a meaningful way. The Village Voice recently ran an excellent series that highlights many of the reasons the NYPD might have for wanting to avoid transparency: http://www.villagevoice.com/2010…”

The really great thing about this piece is that it’s very much in the spirit of Gov 2.0 and open government. Moore uses an innovative means of finding answers by using Quora. He also uses crowdsourcing, a favorite of open government advocates—include everyone, make their opinions public.

And the responses are expert. One responder notes that a weakness specific to Canadian local government is a focus on technology by the agencies housing records, as opposed to a focus on information delivery. That’s an opinion that identifies remediable problems concretely. It should thus serve as an example to government officials to include us, because we won’t let you down.

The piece is definitely worth checking out.

Great sources for local government transparency

I wanted to draw everyones attention to a couple of great local government transparency initiatives. One is #localgovchat on Twitter. It’s got a lot of great information on how people are working at a local level to get government up online.

#localgovchat actually let me to OpenMuni, which is a “tool for cataloging case studies, best practices, and standards for open data and open source on the local level.” It has an amazing database of local open source initiatives, as well as great data set examples for local governments.