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
-
Weekly Media Roundup – May 1, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:David Herbert with the National Journal (subscription required) wrote about the grades new media experts from across the political spectrum gave the Obama administration’s Web presence. The experts gave WhiteHouse.gov an average grade of C+. Although they mostly see it as an improvement from the previous administration’s site, many noted that it remained a one-way forum and suggested it be opened to allow comments and other interactive features. Herbert quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, “This occasional use of interactive tools” is impressive, but “90 percent of the time the site is pretty straightforward, as it was under [George W.] Bush.” Recovery.gov, the administration’s site where citizens can monitor the expenditure and use of recovery funds, fared even worse in the Journal’s poll, averaging a C. The most common gripe about the site, Herbert writes, is that it’s “the view from 30,000 feet,” as Micah Sifry, senior technology advisor for Sunlight and Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) co-founder, told him. Without providing on-the-the ground details, Recovery.gov offers taxpayers few tools for staying on top of where their money is going, reviewers said. Recovery.gov has competition in the form of privately-operated Recovery.org, which has “more granular data and a real search tool, which one assumes we’ll eventually see on Recovery.gov,” Micah explains. “I don’t think it’s fair to compare this site to other Web sites yet, as it’s just weeks old,” Micah added. “Let’s take another look in three to six months, OK?”
Chris Lefkow with Agence France-Presse gained a different take by interviewing academics, technology analysts and nonpartisan groups on the administration’s technology efforts. Lefkow writes that they all said the first “tech president” is off to a good start. Lefkow quotes John Wonderlich, Sunlight’s policy director, “their first pronouncements are very encouraging,” and added that the challenge, however, is going to be the implementation. Andrew Resiej, Sunlight’s other senior technology advisor and PDF co-founder, said the administration been doing as much as it can to fulfill its promises in regards to transparency and technological innovation. “However they’ve been constrained by decades of industrial-age rules and regulations and procurement protocols that are handicapping the speed at which they can implement that vision,” he said.
-
Kundra’s Mission
It’s an understatement to say that us open government advocates have placed great hope on Vivek Kundra. We take President Obama’s chief information officer at his word when he says he wants to radically change the way the federal government communicates with citizens, and vice versa. “We’re going to be publishing government data and [operating on] a default assumption that information should be [available] to the people, not with the default assumption that information should not be in the public domain,” he said during a speech he gave last month in Washington.
On Thursday, Government Computer News published a fascinating article by Joab Jackson, GCN’s senior technology editor, that looks at two main themes that have emerged regarding Kundra’s approach. Jackson also looks back illustratively at Kundra’s brilliant tenure as chief technology officer for Washington, D.C., as a guide as how he will approach his new role with the feds.
Jackson writes that cloud computing is first on Kundra’s list, the idea of taking advantage of services already available on the internet. He envisions putting government images on Flickr, videos on YouTube and having government offices using Google Apps. Jackson points out that this is the exact approach Vivek took for the D.C. government, cutting the cost of buying new software and allowing District employees to interact with each other. No doubt challenges exist that would have to overcome, such as setting up private clouds for sensitive data and changing bureaucratic aversion from opening up and fear of losing control.
Kundra says he will follow through on Obama’s promise of opening up government data, calling it a “key agenda item that we’re going to be pushing in this administration.” Again, Jackson looks back at his time with D.C. government. Not only did Kundra put on the Web 240 data feeds from District government internal systems (everything from bus and subway train schedules to crime statistics), he set up a contest to have developers design applications from government data. Apps for Democracy motivated volunteers to build 47 new apps for the Web and hand-held devices. Kundra also plans to build Data.gov, which he promises will be the go-to site for government data feeds.
Not only does Kundra promise to open up the data, he wants to make it much easier to use by increasing the power of government servers and making sure it’s accessible in formats that are nonproprietary and don’t require a computer science degree to use and understand.
This is getting really exciting.
