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Is the hype behind E-Government justified?
Before I begin, I would like to first thank Mr. Jacobs for the opportunity to contribute to this blog. Hopefully I can provide some new perspectives about government information through the eyes of an (aspiring) economist. There is no doubt that E-Government is all the rage these days. One justification for E-Government is that technology makes government more transparent, and transparency deters corruption. To the best of my knowledge, there are actually few studies that look at whether E-Government actually prevents the government from behaving badly. There is one recent study by Anderson in Information Economics and Policy that attempts to identify this relationship. Using an indexes for corruption and E-Government, he confirms that E-Government can indeed reduce corruption, even after "controlling for any propensity for corrupt governments to be more or less aggressive in adopting e-government initiatives." (pg 210) A broader claim one may extrapolate from this study is that transparency prevents corruption. E-Government acts as a mechanism for transparency, in a similar manner as media/press. That said, a study by Snyder and Stromberg finds that American politicians don't work as hard (for their constituents) if they receive less press coverage. One advantage of E-Government is that the government knows more about their inner workings than information starved reporters. The trade-off though is that government can cherry-pick what information is revealed; why would any rational corrupt government official agree to reveal information that supports claims of his bad behavior? To that end, reporters in search for political scandals are more likely to shine the light on bad behavior than E-Government. Continue reading
Poligraft: one click to transparency in the news
Our friends at Sunlight Labs have done it again! They just released a tool called PoliGraft. Paste the url of a news story or blog post into the tool (or better yet, install their handy bookmarklet in your browser's tool bar!) and the tool analyzes the story, mines it for names, corporations etc and quickly spits out the interconnections between the people, organizations and relationships contributions associated with the story. The data mined by the tool is provided by the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute for Money in State Politics. For example, here's a NY Times article about Elena Kagan's confirmation to the US Supreme Court and here's the PoliGraft results including the original text and the report on aggregated contributions and points of influence of the many politicians named in the NYT story. A very cool tool indeed!
Sunshine Week 2010 shines light on government transparency
[UPDATE: Scroll down for list of library happenings for Sunshine Week]
Spring has sprung with a vengeance here in SF. And that could only mean one thing: Sunshine Week!! Yes it's time once again to feel the warm FOIA on your cheek, to discuss and raise awareness of the importance of free and open government information, transparency and the [w:Freedom of Information Act]. Be on the lookout for editorials in your local newspaper (like this one in the Cleveland Plain Dealer), discuss FOIA with your friends and family (you'll be glad you did :-)) and highlight it in your libraries -- perhaps by having a public showing of the OpenTheGovernment Webcast!
OpenTheGovernment.org is having a Sunshine Week Webcast 12-2PM EST on Friday March 19 entitled "Building Transparency." The Webcast will include a host of great speakers including Norm Eisen, Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform, Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, John Wonderlich, Policy Director at the Sunlight Foundation, Kevin Goldberg, American Society of News Editors (ASNE) counsel, Miriam Nisbet, Director of the new Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), Melanie Sloan, Executive Director, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Melanie Pustay, Director of the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Information Policy (OIP), Eric Gundersen, President and co-founder of Development Seed and Sean Moulton, Director of Federal Information Policy at OMB Watch. It should be a great discussion so hope you can tune in.
What libraries and others are doing for Sunshine Week:
- Northern CA Association of Law Libraries (NOCALL), in association with the Special Library Association Sierra Nevada Chapter, is sponsoring 2 Sunshine Week events; one in Sacramento and one in San Francisco. Both have interesting lists of speakers and require registration for a small fee ($20 for Sacramento event and $15 for SF event). In addition, the SF event immediately precedes the NOCALL Spring Institute on information piracy, "Piracy on the Barbary Coast" which NOCALL and SLA members can attend at the NOCALL member rate, and later in the evening, a celebration of NOCALL's 30th anniversary.
- Freedom of Information Day at the New York Public Library. Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 10:30 - noon. Conference Room 18 on the lower level of New York Public Library (188 Madison Ave. @ 34th St.). This year's guest speaker is Heather Joseph, Executive Director, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, (SPARC), an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communications. FOIA day has been held at NYPL annually since 1993.
- California State University San Bernardino Pfau Library has partnered with the San Bernardino League of Women Voters to be a site for the OpenTheGovernment.org webinar on government transparency. This is the second year that Pfau Library has participated. You can see video of last year.
- The web site www.TalkStandards.com will focus on open government during its monthly online forum. The forum will take place on Thursday March 18th from 8-12 Pacific / 11-3 EST / 4-8pm GMT. TalkStandards is an active online community where ICT developers, researchers, policymakers and other interested parties can share ideas and collaborate on the global standards system. Each month, a timely topic is chosen (last month, it was eHealth, for example).
LA Times Profiles Information Guerrillas
Los Angeles Time business columnist Michael Hiltzik discusses key players in the Free Government Information movement in the article These crusaders bring transparency to government (28 September 2009). Continue reading
USPTO latest agency looking to outsource their data
[UPDATE: Michael Keller, University Librarian at Stanford University (and my boss), wrote a letter to USPTO as well. Thanks Carl for posting it to scribd.] Carl Malamud made me aware (see his letter to USPTO CIO John Owens below) of a posting on FedBizOpps of a Request for Information (RFI) from the US Patent and Trademark Office:
"This RFI seeks to obtain information from interested parties, including the vendor community, about potential opportunities to acquire patent and trademark data in bulk (my emphasis) and to provide such data to the public without cost. The USPTO is seeking comments on the identified problem and solutions that will make the data available to the public without charge."While there is mention in the RFI of IP data being easily accessible to the public, there's no mention of data.gov. This seems to be purely a "no-cost" way for USPTO to upgrade their IT infrastructure by giving away public domain information. This is worrisome on so many levels as it is just one more example of a government agency looking to outsource and privatize public domain information *and* its IT infrastructure -- see for example the Thomson West contract with the GAO to digitize their legislative histories. Additionally, in a vague nod to transparency, USPTO will be holding 1 (yes only 1) vendor information meeting on Sept 24. I'm not sure how USPTO thinks that a 2 week notice for a meeting held in DC will help the cause of transparency. Shouldn't they have several meetings in different geographic locations to talk about such a huge and important public resource (nearly 2 petabytes of data!!)? Luckily, this is only at the RFI stage, not RFP stage. USPTO is currently only looking for information on how to do this. This is the time for the government information/transparency communities to submit ideas for how the USPTO could make their patent information available *without* giving it away to vendors. Please contact the USPTO at the addresses below and give them ideas for making their data open, standardized and freely available in bulk. Public Meeting:
Thursday, 24 September 2009
9:00 a.m. -11:00 a.m.
USPTO Campus in the Madison Auditorium
600 Dulany Street
Alexandria, VA, 22314 Contracting Office Address:
P. O. Box 1450 - Mail Stop 6
600 Dulany Street, MDE, 7th Floor
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 Primary Point of Contact.:
publicdatadissemination@uspto.gov
Secondary Point of Contact:
V. Anne Tugbang,
Contracting Officer
vanne.tugbang@uspto.gov
Phone: 5712726550
Fax: 5712736550
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