Improving government transparency online: citizen-engaging technology can make government data available online, easy to access, and understandable

Public Manager, The, Spring, 2008 by Jerry Brito

Book Burro, MAPLight, and More

When a site makes its data available in open formats, it cannot conceive of the many creative ways the data will be put to use. Book Burro, for example, is a plug-in for the popular Firefox Web browser that senses when you are looking at a page for a book (at Amazon.com, for example) and then fetches and displays data about the book's availability at local libraries, as well as the prices at competing online stores. Trendio uses open application interfaces from Yahoo, Google, and Technorati to index articles emanating from more than 3,000 news sources. It tracks the relative trends of words contained in those articles. The result is an index of trends in the media.

Mashups built on open interfaces and structured data represent a great potential fount of information about the workings of government. Their varied and unexpected outcomes can potentially make government activities transparent and reveal patterns now hidden in murky mountains of unstructured data. To get a sense of the possible, we can take a look at a leading transparency mashup called MAPLight.org.

The MAP in MAPLight.org stands for "money and politics," and the site's mission is to illuminate the connection between the two. Founded by computer expert Dan Newman, the site mashes together congressional voting data and campaign finance information. The result is a searchable database that highlights the connections between campaign contributions and how members of Congress vote.

Using the MAPLight database, users can look up a particular bill and see the interest groups, as well as the component individuals and corporations that support and oppose it. They can also see how members of Congress voted on bills and their contributors.

Crowdsourcing

If government data are successfully opened to public scrutiny online, seemingly impenetrable mountains of data will be made available. Mashups can help ease the information overload by highlighting the most interesting connections among data sets, but human judgment is still necessary to determine the most relevant facts. Crowdsourcing presents the key to sifting through the data made available by official disclosures, hacks, and mashups.

Although the United States has only 1,452 daily newspapers, about 70 million blogs are in operation, and about 120,000 new blogs come online each day. The vast majority of these blogs no doubt serve to inform and entertain a small circle of friends and relatives. Nevertheless, tens of thousands aspire to engage in journalism, and some have been successful. This affords a massive pool of ready and willing citizen journalists the likes of which traditional media has never assembled. This strength in numbers can allow the new technologies of transparency to be put to fruitful use despite the quantity of data available.

In his seminal essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Eric S. Raymond contrasts the open-source method of software development-in essence peer production or crowdsourcing-to the traditional hierarchical model. In the former, a large number of developers contribute simultaneously to the formulation and testing of software code, while central organization and a small number of developers typify the latter. He explains that one of the key differences is the number of eyes sifting through code looking for problems and solutions. He proposes what he calls Linus's Law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."