John blogged about the first piece of the platform, Independent Expenditures, and today I’ll be focusing lobbying disclosure, which, even before Citizens United, needed to be updated to address the who, what, when, and why a lobbying contact took place. In the wake of Citizens United, real time, online, substantive disclosure becomes even more critical to demonstrate that corporate expenditures are indeed independent and to shed light on whether there is even the appearance of coercion.

Require Substantive, Timely Disclosure by Lobbyists

Imagine the following: Fat Cat Lobbyist meets Senator Spineless to ask for help with a controversial bill. Soon after, the airwaves in Senator Spineless’ state are blanketed with ads paid for by Fat Cat’s corporate (or union) client, supporting the senator in an upcoming election. The fundamental question is whether, when the senator met with the lobbyist, he felt threatened that he would face a barrage of negative attacks if he did not support the lobbyist’s position. As it stands now, nowhere is it disclosed that the meeting between the senator and the lobbyist even took place. There is simply no way for the public to decipher the senator’s motivation or whether he is acting in the public interest.

To shed light on such possible conflicts of interests, it is critical that within 24 hours of contacting a government official to request a specific government action, lobbyists be required to electronically report the name of the official being lobbied, a summary of the action requested and the name of the lobbyist’s client or employer.

Part and parcel to the requirement that lobbyists disclose the names of the officials they meet with is the requirement that all influence peddlers be required to report their meetings. The current 20 percent exemption for lobbyist reporting must be eliminated so that all significant contacts in which a request is made for a government action are fully disclosed. Corporate and union heads along with anyone who bundles campaign contributions must be required to report their meetings with government officials so that a gaping disclosure loophole can be closed.

The Citizens United decision gave corporations and unions a new and forceful method to twist the arms of elected officials in the form of threatened independent expenditures. This is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of organizations with very deep pockets. Only by exposing when and how that coercive weapon may be being used can the public understand its impact and have at least a chance of combating it.

You can see where we are so far by visiting this page. Be sure to check out the wiki.

http://sunlightfoundation.com/campaign

We believe that a disaffected, disengaged, cynical public threatens democracy in the United States as few other things can. At its heart, our campaign is about building the political and community clout necessary to combat this problem.

We think we can invigorate democracy by coming together, demanding transparency with serious political muscle, using the very latest in technology to make government information more meaningfully accessible to us, and holding government accountable with it.

As we embark on this campaign, it’s important we’re on the same page about a lot of things, but there’s probably nothing more important to be clear about than our values and beliefs.

So here are five principles we will hold to in all our work.

1) Think and Act Like a Movement
2) Listen and Be Authentic
3) Create Beautiful, Compelling Content
4) Fail Harder…
5) Laugh As Often As Possible

Here’s what we mean.

1) Think and act like a movement.

At its heart, this “campaign” is facilitating the growth of a movement. This is not a command and control type thing we are building. To that end, we will share everything and build leaders.

Anything that is created or has success with this campaign – from logos and style guides to resources and training materials to tactics and lessons learned – will be open and shared across the network. With this approach we want to empower any person who is willing to take up the call of making government transparent with the tools s/he would need to be successful.

One of the best examples of this ethos is, oddly enough, embodied by the U.S. Marine Corps as they make “every man a rifle man” – or “every person a rifle person” as it’s been reworked in recent decades. In other words, if you’re a Marine, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the infantry, an officer or a cook; in all cases, you receive some of the best rifle training in the world and could take up arms on the front lines if required.

While we certainly aren’t militaristic, we can’t stress it enough:

In the open government movement, we want every single citizen to have easy access to all the tools and resources they would need to communicate the need for transparency at the local, state and federal levels, and be able to take actions that help bring it about.

2) Listen and be authentic

From our failures to our concerns to our needs and questions (big and small), we want to listen first and make statements second. We’ll be upfront and honest with each other, acknowledge what’s working and what’s not, and remember that we’re all on the same team trying to accomplish a very large mission.

3) Create beautiful, compelling content.

Making the case for anything in a way that gets hundreds of thousands of people to buy in and actively support takes a lot of convincing and influence. When it comes to transparency, we are trying to build public support and influence government with a relatively new, still relatively amorphous concept. To that end, image and message matter in a big way. We commit to making sure we deliver compelling messages in simple to understand, beautiful packages – from email to video to data visualizations to Web sites to text messages to …whatever we come up with.

4) Fail Harder.

Or: Fail “quickly and cheaply.” We are taking on a very challenging mission in making local, state and federal government transparent. If it was easy, it would have been done already. That means in order to succeed, we’re going to have to try some big things that have never been done before – and that means sometimes we’re going to fall on our face. The internet makes it possible to “fail” quickly and cheaply, and when that happens, that’s a good thing – as long as we learn and grow from it. If we’re not failing sometimes, we’re not pushing hard enough.

5) Laugh as often as possible.

Whether we are building a network of leaders, being open with each other, creating content, failing harder or dealing with jerks, laughter helps a lot. Just about always. Just because our mission is challenging doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be having fun along the way.

And to that end, a somewhat related principle to number 5 that is worth noting and will make all our lives easier:

6) Have no tolerance for jerks.

We adhere strongly to this rule. Please don’t be one. If it needs explaining to you, it’s possible you’re a jerk :)

With these values in place, there are a couple of assumptions we will have in the approach to our work, that we also want to be very clear about. I’ll discuss those in the post right after this one.

On the timeline (WH version) of what the Directive requires, Friday was the deadline for:

• each agency to post an agency.gov/Open webpage,
• the White House to post the Open Government Dashboard, and
• OMB guidance on federal spending transparency.

As the White House dashboard makes clear, agencies have posted their /Open pages, along with pages designed for feedback and ideas for open government.  (Here’s DOD’s ideascale page, for example.)  Most agencies have deployed the Ideascale tool that the GSA helped prepare for this purpose.

As observers judge the administration’s progress in the face of this milestone, they should remember that the requirements for the Directive are intended to be both aggressive and iterative.  They’re aggressive in that agencies were given a 60 day deadline for the creation of a Web page, (a short time to design something so important).  They’re iterative because the deadlines are only deadlines for a launch, not a final evaluation.

That’s why the White House Open Government Dashboard is evaluating on largely binary terms.  Agencies have either launched their /Open pages, or they haven’t.  They either designated an official for data integrity, or they haven’t.

This is an appropriate level of administration scrutiny for how the OGD was designed.  More detailed evaluation metrics would have taken time to design and implement, and if agencies were going to be judged on a 45 point system, they would have waited far longer to launch their /Open pages.

Sometimes the best thing to do is act, and to make improvements as necessary.

That should be the spirit in which the Administration’s Open Government Initiative is being undertaken, and it should be judged on similar terms.

Just as the balance between judgment and creativity is important for other aspects of government performance, it’s appropriate for the OGD, where the Administration has chosen a highly public, iterative, experimentational approach to creating a more transparent government.

It’s time to start thinking about how agencies should be judged on their progress on the Directive.  It’s also time for anyone for has an interest in agencies data to speak up, and let agencies know what they need.  We should think about what agencies’ Open Government Plans should look like, and how we can make sure they’re effective.

Those plans are required to be posted on April 7th of this year, and they will set the stage for access to agency transparency from now on.

The White House also revealed its Open Government Dashboard, which monitors 29 agencies for compliance with the OGD. The timely creation of this Dashboard fulfills another promise contained in the OGD.

What’s notable about the White House’s Dashboard is that it helps hold agencies accountable by identifying the 4 agencies that have yet to fully comply with the OGD: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Office of Personnel Management, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the Office of the US Trade Representative, in addition to indicating the 25 that have fully complied. These 4 agencies have yet to release all three high-value data sets. The Council on Environmental Quality receives an additional warning light for having failed to assign a senior official to ensure data quality.

We are in the preliminary stages of looking at what’s on these /open websites, with four questions initially springing to mind:

• Does each agency’s website contain everything set forth in the OGD?
• Do they exceed those expectations?
• Are the websites designed well?

• Are they making progress towards developing their Open Government Plan?

Both Intellitics and the General Services Administration have put together links to each agency’s pages (and RSS feeds) for gathering feedback and engaging in discussion with the public about the Plan. GSA has also added additional means of contact, specifically email and postal addresses.

In addition, GSA has an additional tool available: a wiki — the open government playbook — that aggregates a lot work done by the government and those outside the government on transparency. Its purpose is to “serve as a useful directory to [OGD] resources” — and invites everyone from government officials to members of the public to contribute. It is a great idea. (We had previously gathered all of our OGD resources on our separate wiki page.)

We’ll have a lot more to say in the upcoming days and weeks, particularly as we dig into the /open pages and the OGD Plan.

Before moving on, I must note that the White House took a risk in publicly setting a deadline for creating these /open pages. Meeting this deadline may not result in a lot of favorable media attention, but had agencies failed to do so, the White House may have been subject to a lot of criticism. The architects of the OGD deserve credit for taking a risk, for being willing to risk public failure in order to make something good happen. At first glace, they made it happen. Congratulations.

We’re going to take a hard look at these webpages to see how well they satisfy the details of the OGD, what improvements should be made, and evaluate the emergence of the Open Government Plan over the next 60 days. There’s a lot more to do, but Saturday marks an important milestone.

As advocates for government openness, we support the Administration’s efforts to provide the public with access to information through Data.gov. We are eager to work with you to ensure the success of Data.gov and, in that spirit, write to raise our concerns with the datasets submitted by agencies to fulfill their requirement under the Open Government Directive to post three high value datasets by January 22, and to offer constructive suggestions for improving their usefulness.

As an overall recommendation, we urge you to add public representatives to the Open Government Initiative interagency working committee and ask the committee to address the problems and recommendations identified below.

Release Format and Usability by the Public

We understand one of the primary purposes of Data.gov is to enable the technology community and transparency advocates to most effectively use the data to make a direct impact on the daily lives of the American people. The format of the data plays a key role in its usability; many within the community of advocates who re-use and repackage government data would prefer data in CSV format, rather than the XML format in which many of the posted databases are provided. Accordingly, we recommend that you strike an appropriate balance between formats (such as XML) that serve the coding community and web-based presentations by agencies that can be used and understood by the general public.

In addition, some of the currently posted files are quite large, ranging upward to several hundred megabytes. Their large size undermines their usefulness for most people or organizations. The large number of currently posted datasets also makes it difficult to find a particular database of interest. We therefore recommend that if a Data.gov dataset is available from an agency through a web-based interface, Data.gov link to that interface on the dataset’s Data.gov landing page. For a consumer looking for information on a car seat, for example, it would be far easier to search the Department of Transportation’s online database rather than scrolling through screen after screen of raw data in XML format. Additionally, as agencies continue to post datasets to Data.gov, efforts should be made to identify those of greatest public interest that lack such interfaces and develop web interfaces that allow the data to be explored online.

Further, while we agree there is value in aggregating government data in a single site, it is questionable how much the collocation of the currently posted information on Data.gov actually benefits the public. The site is not searchable by topic and does not provide any way to bring together data from different sources on similar topics.

As an enhancement to the organization of the site, we recommend that you use tagging or metadata to enable the public to bring together information on a topic. The thesaurus that USA.gov uses provides a useful example of the needed vocabulary.

Value of Data

The release of the datasets also has prompted discussions about the value and the quality of the released data, and the additional value provided by access to existing data in a new format. We believe repackaging old information is of marginal value, yet that is what many agencies have done with their recent postings on Data.gov. According to the Sunlight Foundation, of 58 datasets posted by major agencies, only 16 were previously unavailable in some format online. This leaves the impression that agencies posted easily available data, the proverbial low-hanging fruit, rather than seriously considering which of their datasets truly are of high value. While these initial postings can be considered a test run, more attention needs to be directed toward ensuring the overall quality and usefulness of the data.

In addition, sustained attention should be paid to the possibility of making some of the datasets available as feeds that are constantly up to date, rather than as static datasets that are pulled down and then reposted on an occasional basis. We recommend that agencies be required to explain why the data is high value by having them designate which of the “high value criteria” the data meets: information that can be used to increase agency accountability and responsiveness; improve public knowledge of the agency and its operations; further the core mission of the agency; create economic opportunity; or respond to need and demand as identified through public consultation. Similarly, we recommend requiring agencies to indicate whether a high value dataset was previously unavailable, available only with a FOIA request, available only for purchase, or available, but in a less user-friendly format. Going forward, this will make it much easier to track how agencies are complying with the other requirements of the Open Government Directive. While we appreciate the value of data that furthers the mission of an agency, we believe it is equally important to make available to the public data that holds an agency accountable for its policy and spending decisions. We hope to see more datasets of this type available in the near future.

Quality

As is to be expected in efforts of this type, there were a number of glitches–datasets that could not be downloaded or, once downloaded, could not be opened (the Central Contractor Registration FOIA extract from the General Services Administration seems to have caused several users problems). Additionally, some datasets were incomplete (the Hazard Grant Mitigation Program data released by FEMA is missing 23 years of data between 1966 and 1989). Even more troubling, some did not have header rows, and for those that did, their Data.gov pages did not always link to code sheets explaining what those header rows meant. Without this information, the data cannot be used.

We therefore urge the implementation of a responsive feedback mechanism that allows the public to alert an agency that a specific dataset is not working, lacks information, or is missing explanatory material and provides a response to the concerns within a specified time. One way to address this may be to include an agency contact with the ability to resolve any database problems or provide information about the database. The interagency working group could sample the quality of these agency-specific dialogues to ensure that they are having an impact and to develop recommendations on best practices to improve the responsiveness. Additionally, we strongly recommend that all datasets on Data.gov be directly associated with their code sheets.

Finally, we are concerned with the current lack of public notice when data is removed from the site. We respectfully urge you to note all raw tools and data that are removed from Data.gov, and to provide an explanation for their removal.

Many of the concerns outlined above apply across all or many of the agencies’ datasets. Accordingly, we think that standards for handling these types of problems can easily be addressed through the interagency working group and then disseminated amongst the agencies.

Mr. Stern’s FOIA request to Treasury turned up 2 internal memos detailing what Mr. Patterson could — and could not — work on. But this raises further questions in Mr. Stern’s mind. How did Treasury come up with its list of verboten activities? Why doesn’t the ban on Mr. Patterson’s activities encompass all the tasks he performed for Goldman Sachs, as disclosed in its Lobbying Disclosure Form?

I must add, why wasn’t this done through a publicly disclosed waiver in the first place? I’ve found it hard to get answers from Treasury about other issues related to TARP, so I wonder if this is part of a pattern of behavior.

This is the first full month that has been release by the administration and adds almost 100,000 new records for October. As we mentioned back in January, this is a positive step by the Obama administration, and we are happy to see that they are committed to releasing this data in a timely basis.

We still don’t know how many records are being withheld, and for what purposes. It would be nice for the White House to release at least a number, and ultimately a justification (read: national security) for why those names have been redacted. None the less, this is still part of a much larger, unprecedented level of transparency on behalf of the administration.

One of the other problems with the White House visitor logs is that there is no real accurate way to ensure that if you see a “Samuel L. Jackson” in the logs, it’s actually the actor. It could just be another Sam. That’s why we caution you, when you are reading through the records and doing your own independent research not to jump to conclusions. Otherwise, happy hunting!

Thought you might like to see it.

My colleague Daniel asked last week about the need for a site like Budget.gov that is open and easily accessible to the public. It’s a great idea.

One of the other first things we can do is simply point out the process and shine some light on it.

The staff at Congressional Quarterly put this extremely useful calendar together yesterday

Feb. 1 (yesterday): President Obama submits his fiscal 2011 budget request to Congress.

Feb. 2: Congressional committees begin hearings on president’s budget request.

April 15: Statutory deadline (though frequently missed) for Congress to complete its annual budget resolution. The resolution sets a limit on discretionary spending and may include instructions for a reconciliation bill.

May 15: The date after which the House may consider fiscal 2011 spending bills even if a final budget resolution has not been adopted.

July 3: Beginning of Congress’ Independence Day recess. This is the informal deadline that House leaders set for passing all 12 regular appropriations bills.

July 15: President submits his mid-session review of the budget to Congress, which includes revised deficit estimates.

Aug. 7: Beginning of the Senate’s summer recess. This is the Senate’s informal deadline for passing all 12 spending bills.

Mid-August: Congressional Budget Office issues updated budget projections.

Sept. 13: House and Senate return from summer recess with 18 days to negotiate their differences and clear all appropriations bills before the new fiscal year begins.

Oct. 1: Fiscal 2011 begins. A continuing resolution would now be required to finance any agency whose appropriations bill has not been enacted.

I’ll be blogging on what we’ve identified, and inviting your response in the comments. Today, I’m starting with number one on our list:

Create a Powerful Independent Expenditure Reporting System

In its simplest form, the Citizens United decision reversed a ban on independent expenditures from corporations and unions. To understand what that means, a great place to start is the FEC’s now-outdated explanatory page on independent expenditures and coordinated communications. I’ll excerpt here, since the page will be changing soon:

Independent Expenditures

An independent expenditure is an expenditure for a communication “expressly advocating the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate that is not made in cooperation, consultation, or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate, a candidate’s authorized committee, or their agents, or a political party or its agents.” 11 CFR 100.16(a).

Who May Make Independent Expenditures

Persons permitted to make contributions in connection with federal elections (such as individuals and political committees) may make independent expenditures. Persons prohibited from making contributions or expenditures in connection with federal elections (such as corporations, labor organizations and individuals or businesses with federal government contracts) are similarly prohibited from making independent expenditures. However, there is one exception to this rule.

What we’re reading here is carefully prepared guidance, which cite regulations, and which are empowered through laws enacted by Congress and signed by the President. Citizens United does away with parts of all three. Since there isn’t a disclosure requirement in place yet for a practice that wasn’t permitted until now, that requirement must be created.

That’s our first step.

Since these new expenditures could have an enormous effect on the ideas and messages that the public and politicians receive, our first step is to arm them with knowledge about political spending that is occurring. The public needs this information so that we can evaluate advertisements, similar messages, and the actions of corporations, unions, and others. Similarly, politicians and government officials need this information so that they can understand who is trying to influence them.

This first element of our proposal contains a number of individual ideas. I’d be happy to flesh them out in more detail in the comments.

Our goal with this first section, however, is simple: to require the new political spending unleashed by Citizens United to be publicly disclosed, to the FEC, in the most meaningful way we there is — in real time, online, and with enough detail to understand what’s really happening.