Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
-
Watching Government Opacity Melt Away, “Right before our Eyes!”
Vivek Kundra, federal CIO, and Macon Phillips, White House new media director, unveiled Office of Management and Budget’s IT dashboard this morning at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York City. And the PDF attendees gave him a well-deserved standing ovation.
The dashboard was built to monitor more than $70 billion in government information technology spending, showing all contracts within every agency, and is one of the features of the redesigned USASpending.gov, re-launched early this morning.
During the presentation, Kundra mentioned that launching a platform that will allow the government to tap into the best thinking and the best ideas. And Phillips added that it’s just the beginning. Kundra also admitted that announcing that the federal data will be available online to the public has spurred government bureaucrats to start cleaning it up, proving the rule that sunlight is the best disinfectant. The initial dashboard is for IT expenditures only. And I’d add, however, that if you want the data on the government investments in General Motors or AIG you’ll need to go to SubsidyScope.com.
In the question session, Andrew Rasiej, PDF co-founder and Sunlight senior technology advisor, asked Kundra if we should redefine “public” as “searchable, accessible and readable online. Kundra replied with an affirmative absolutely “yes.” As Jay Rosen, N.Y.U. journalism prof, tweeted, “What we’ve been watching with CIO Vivek Kundra at #pdf09 is the undoing of the opacity agenda of the Bush years, right before our eyes!”
NextGov.com’s Gautham Nagesh noted today that the site’s new visualization tools are a definite improvement. “It’s now possible with just a few clicks to see how much money an agency has invested in IT projects and what percentage of those projects are behind schedule or over budget,” Nagesh wrote.
We are told that OMB will be holding a press conference this afternoon at 3:30 (Eastern Time) to highlight the redesigned USASpending.gov and the IT dashboard.
Check it out!
-
The Wisdom of Crowds: Political Reporting Style
Arianna Huffington is entering the world of citizen journalism with her announcement of a new project: The Wisdom of Crowds Hits the Campaign Trail. It's got the makings of a great effort: she's recruiting citizen journalists from around the country to cover the major presidential candidates and asking each of them to contribute to a candidate-specific group blog — offering written updates, campaign tidbits, on-the-scene observations, photos, or original video. The goal is to provide more sources of information, and more outside-the-mainstream voices on the upcoming presidential campaign. She's got the readership to make it happen.
She's doing this a joint project with Jay Rosen's project – NewAssignment.Net, one of our grantees. Jay recently launched his first major distributed reporting assignment in conjunction with Wired.
Some details of this project from Jay include:
Sometime this spring, then, we'll roll out twelve new pages at NewAssignment.Net with a mix of news, information, original reporting and views not-found-elsewhere. Behind each candidate page will be a contributors' network built by hand, made up of people who would like to participate in the 2008 election by claiming a campaign beat and making their own news and commentary, in collaboration with others doing the same thing (but coming from a different place.) All overseen by an editor paid to make the whole thing run, and evaluated by how good the twelves [sic]pages are. …
So there's a structure, and for the contributors substantial freedom within that structure. Some order, some chaos. There are editors, but contributors post what they want at their own mini-blogs. We don't pay you for your time if you choose to become one of our contributors. Neither do we own your work. A Creative Commons license will apply to it. There will be no ads at the NewAssignment.Net site, which is non-profit, an experiment with the power-of-many in online journalism. The Huffington Post, which does have ads, will have the right to pull content from our 12 candidate pages.
I can't help but wonder how we might apply this concept to some key Congressional campaigns in 2008.
