The Washington Examiner was kind enough to publish an Op-Ed I wrote on transparency in the new administration.

The starting paragraphs:

The history of the American experiment has seen a constant struggle for fundamental change and reinvention. President-elect Obama ran on change, and now faces high expectations for a radical transformation in how the public relates to the presidency.

At the core of every “government reform” initiative has been the urgent sense that government was failing in its basic responsibilities, and that citizens’ needs were not being adequately represented in Washington.

Caused by economic hardship, government waste, flagrant corruption or over-concentrated power, these eras all saw constituents’ hostility coalesce into new expectations, to which public officials were forced to respond.

Now is no different. Obama campaigned in accord with the anti-incumbent mood, placing change and innovation over tradition and experience, running as an agent of reform.

0 Comments

Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of The Washington (D.C.) Examiner, and strong  ally of Sunlight’s thirst for more transparency of information, attended the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 conference in New York, to appear on the panel that I convened. It was his first, and based on the refection he posted to his blog, it sounds like PDF has a new convert. Mark reports that it was not only quite memorable, but he also became infused with “a heightened sense that we are on the cusp of profound, even revolutionary changes in government and public policy thanks to the Internet.”  He adds that, as a conservative, he doesn’t use the word “revolution” lightly.

He writes that two things struck him at the conference: one being the staggering magnitude of the possibilities as a result of the explosion of information technology, and the other being how progressives have embraced this revolution quicker and more thoroughly than conservatives.

Mark, as a good classic conservative, fears what he calls “Leviathan,” or “the all-powerful central government.” Seeing how inept the federal government is currently with information technology it’s very easy to get lulled into a false belief that there is no way it could ever get so deviously savvy to pose much of a threat. But of course Mark is correct to fear the potential of an Orwellian Internet-empowered centralized power. You’ve got to believe that sooner rather than later the feds will wake up and embrace this technology. The question is, will it be used for good or ill? And here at Sunlight, as well as with our friends and colleagues, we are dedicated to opening up the government with these new tools so that we can achieve a much more robust democracy, preventing Mark’s monstrous scenario.

(more…)

1 Comment