Sunlight Foundation

OK, let’s get into it…

Whenever discussions arise around User Generated Content on government web sites, expect much wringing of hands.

What if somebody posts *wrong* information?
What if the government *removes* a post?
What if somebody drops an f-bomb?
What if there’s a picture of someone’s bare ankle? (Great concern among certain communities who believe in modest dress.)

Well, I for one am utterly over this issue.

Last I checked, I live in a country where a major point of division is whether or not people can carry guns. And the gun debate includes whether or not “registration” is required and if background checks (“reputation”) are necessary. Also, my society seems amenable to outsourcing core government functions from tax collection to national security to contractors who get to play by different rules to sometimes sad consequences.

So, let’s get real. It’s time for rough consensus and running code.

1. Congress and Federal government are RULE MAKING and POLICING organizations; it’s OK for them to make reasonable rules and police User Generated Content on their web sites.
Citizens, stop fearing government agencies that monitor the safety of your food setting some guidelines about online posts on their websites. Government officials, grow some backbone. If you can put up with being hauled before Congress, misquoted in the press, and arrested for breaking the public trust. I think you can handle a little well-intentioned user input (even sniping) on your public website and accept a measure of responsibility for how users behave themselves there.

2. Rules for UGC on government websites are not the same as privately owned websites; but they aren’t that different either.
If citizens tolerate passing through a metal detector en route to Jury duty, then I suspect citizens will tolerate their posts passing through a filter to remove naughty words. And I think citizens will also tolerate various other citizens being entrusted with special privileges to play special roles, provided they have been given training and pass regular tests. The courtroom has its judges, lawyers, recorders, juries, volunteers, rules, and tradition. The courtroom also has rules protecting the accused. Congress has its rules, roles, and traditions, too. Government websites can have identified community managers and qualified outside volunteers.

3. Any debate around anonymity on a government site these days belongs on par with any debate on the extent citizens identify themselves (and to whom) in various settings; in some contexts registration makes sense, in others optional, and in still others an invasion of privacy that can’t be tolerated.

4. The hard problems remain the hard problems; we need checks and balances, we need to watch the watchdogs.
Our representatives should debate and pass reasonable laws to provide oversight mechanisms and consequences for parties who corruptly and capriciously moderate comments on government websites for self or special interest gain.

5. Using 3rd party service providers isn’t a big deal; just use them appropriately, non-discriminatory and take advantage of what’s open and free.
The Bush administration paid $400B last year to government contractors. And Bush isn’t the first administration to outsource. Every one’s queasiness over YouTube and Terms of Service and proprietary tools needs some perspective. It’d be stupid not to use these tools proprietary or not, and it be stupid to only use proprietary tools when open protocols and free tools are only a few clicks or a little programming away.

6. We know the principles: everyone has the same rights and freedoms; presume innocence until proven guilty after judgment by a jury of peers; right of appeal; majority rule can’t take away rights of minority.
Sounds a lot like Craigslist to me. But with extra attention to enforcing minority rights. We can’t celebrate social media giving us greater voice only to shout down—or flag as inappropriate—the loyal opposition. Government websites, like all government assets, belong to all of us and all of us are responsible for their stewardship.

So let’s stop the hand wringing from all sides here. Let’s have some free comments and content as part of our government sites. Let’s accept some reasonable rules for every one’s safety. Let’s make sure we protect free speech. Let’s get to debugging the beta version of Government 2.0.

Open government ally Carl Malamud has posted a brilliant agenda on public.resource.org, a five point technology plan he has presented to the Obama transition team.

The ideas all reflect Carl’s longstanding work on behalf of the public interest, as a programmer, archivist, institution builder, broadcaster, academic, and publisher. Realizing Malamud’s vision of government information would mean a public sector renaissance, democratizing both publishing and social .gov web use.

I’m particularly fond of the first of the five ideas — “rebooting .gov” which includes, among other things, digitizing all government information, increasing interactivity between government and citizens, and creating a .gov cloud (imagining agile deployment of computing services to government agencies).

All five proposals are worth a thorough read, and close consideration.

More from freegovinfo, and boing boing.

It should go without saying that at Sunlight, we believe that if Congress is required to make a document or report public, it can only satisfy that mandate by putting the information online in a searchable format.  That’s why we would like to see the “Statements of Expenditures” required by law to be made public by the House and Senate to be put online by each of the legislative bodies. Only then will citizens  have access to a full and detailed accounting of how Members spend the taxpayer funds that they receive to run their offices.

These behemoth reports, which weigh in at around four pounds, are published quarterly by the House and semi-annually by the Senate. They are available, “while supplies last,” at the House and Senate document rooms and they can be “viewed” at Federal Depository Libraries.  But they are virtually inaccessible to a citizen wondering what her representative pays members of his staff or whether the congressman is purchasing flat screen TVs, magazine subscriptions or potted plants for the office. At a time when most American families and businesses are tightening their belts, citizens should be able to assess for themselves whether their representatives in Congress are spending taxpayer funds wisely.

Failing to make disbursement reports available online gives them an air of secrecy that is largely unwarranted given the uncontroversial content of the reports.  As Sunlight advocates in our Transparency in Government Act, a transparent 111th Congress will open up its books for review by the public, and will find that this painless endeavor helps to begin to restore the public’s trust in the accountability of the institution.

In the winter of 2007, in between the two sessions of the 110^th Congress, Sen. Trent Lott, an institution in Congress since the 1980s, suddenly announced his impending retirement from the Senate. Lott had an illustrious career as a legislator rising all the way to the top of the Senate, serving as Senate Majority Leader from 1996 to 2001, until a misfired compliment led his party to toss him as leader. Lott’s luck continued to run a shore as Hurricane Katrina demolished his gulf coast home leaving the senator to wage a battle with insurers claiming that there was no evidence that his home was destroyed by a hurricane because there was no home left. These reasons may have been enough to drive Sen. Lott to retire from the Senate when he did, but it was actually the implementation of a simple ethics requirement that pushed him to give up the trappings of the Senate and embrace the cash cow that is K Street.

In October 2007, Congress approved new ethics and lobbying reforms, including an extension of the “cooling off” period for Senators. The “cooling off” period refers to the period of time that some government employees are restricted from lobbying the government after they leave office. The new rules mandated a two-year “cooling off” period – extended from one-year – starting at the beginning of the next session in 2008. Trent Lott avoided this new rule by retiring on December 18, 2007.

“Cooling off” periods, or revolving door reforms, do not solely apply to Congress. The executive branch faces similar problems of conflicts of interest arising from appointees leaving to pursue private sector gigs and private sector employees entering government service. This problem has become increasingly acute over the past decade and that’s why the Project on Government Oversight includes revolving door reform as a key plank in their Presidential transition recommendations: (Read More…)

To kick off our Policy Review blog series, I’d like to start with Steven Clift’s chapter from Rebooting America*, Sidewalks for Democracy Online.

While Clift’s essay presents a number of ideas about how technology should enhance our civic lives, I’d like to focus on the two ideas I see at the heart of his argument. First, that legitimate government is a function of the larger populace, and that that that citizenry finds an ideal expression in well organized communities. The second idea is that the values and mechanisms we recognize in real-world communities are most readily replicated through a familiar online tool — the email list.

The essay initially connects representative government with geography, suggesting that local policy consideration forms a foundation on which all government rests:

Representative democracy is based on geography, on people connecting with one another locally to react to and influence government. And yet, rarely does anything truly interactive happen online that enables citizens to jointly solve problems or to get directly involved in efforts to make their communities better. Democratic participation online is having the effect of disconnecting us from our physical place in the world, to our collective demise.

While I would place much more emphasis on the importance of reason in policy creation, choosing to emphasize discourse over a sense of place, Clifts emphasis on geography becomes clearer when he movingly explains the sort of discourse he’d like to cultivate:

When I was a child and my father had cancer, I remember neighbors coming to our assistance in our time of need. Today, with modern life keeping neighbors as strangers, we must use these new tools to break down barriers to community. You deserve the right to easily e-mail your immediate neighbors the morning after you’ve been burglarized without having to go door-to-door to collect e-mail addresses. We can balance safety and privacy with selective public disclosure of such personal contact information with an intelligent “unlisted to most” directory option that is not the all or nothing of today.

This is big “C” community and small “d” democracy. A collection of better-connected blocks, tied to broader neighborhood and community-wide online efforts will serve as the vibrant foundation we need for accountable and effective representative democracy right up to the Congress and president. You cannot force everyone to be neighborly, but the bonds of community can be restored and nurtured despite dual income families and the assault on time for community involvement.

Whether government is considered at its national level or at a municipal level, Clift’s vision — one of empathy, shared responsibility, and interconnectedness — gives us a better sense of the civic life he values.

While this might seem too sentimental to have any impact on executive branch tech policy, productive community and a shared stake in outcomes — the stuff of the communities Clift envisions — are the stuff of successful online organizing. Most of the successful email lists I’m on, many of which I describe here, are public and open, but also function through the same sense of trust and connection praised in small communities.

All of this is familiar to Clift, of course, who has been a longtime community email list organizer.

I am helping build an online neighborhood forum that will soon connect 10% of the households daily (in an area with 10,000 residents) where I live in Minneapolis. Every neighborhood should have an online space (see links to E-Democracy.Org’s Issues Forums and projects like Vermont’s Front Porch Forum, and the academic i-Neighbors project from E-Democracy.Org/nf). We also need tools that allow people who live within a block of one another to connect many-to-many in secure, semi-public ways. This builds on the simple directory idea above and extends it to support all sorts of exchanges, from babysitting referrals to communicating as a group with city hall about potholes.

As the incoming Obama administration thinks about how to harness the enthusiasm generated by a campaign saturated with ideas about organizing community, they’d do well to listen to the advice of organizers like Steven Clift, who have thought long and hard about how to build civic communities online that are the best of both worlds, giving all the capabilities possible through digital technology without losing the intimate connection of a local email list.

While the policy consequences for transition organizers aren’t exactly clear, Clift has suggestions for the rest of us, including the following:

I have shared some big ideas that will help us make progress over the long term. But what can each one of us do now, today, to restore our democracy?
A. Join or create place-based forums or blogs for your neighborhood or community.
Recruit 100 people, require the use of real names, and open up your own local forum. Learn more at E-Democracy.Org/if. Be sure to give people a choice to participate by e-mail or online.
B. Work with your elected officials to introduce legislation requiring all public meetings to be announced on the Internet. Updating open meeting laws to first require announcements, then agendas, handouts, digital recording, is a good starting point. Learn more at DoWire.Org.
C. Tag the content you produce with geographic terms or “geo tag” if you are technically inclined.

Regardless of how online communities might change with a President who values them, we can be sure that the email list will remain at the center of that organizing world, given its low price, simplicity, and unversality.

*Rebooting America was prepared by the Personal Democracy Forum, which is headed by Micah Sifry and Andrew Raseij, Senior Technology Consultants for the Sunlight Foundation.

Starting today, you’ll be seeing blog posts three times a week on the Sunlight Foundation blog.

Building on the enthusiastic spirit of reform chronicled by Gabriela in our recently posted Open Letter to the Obama Administration, Sunlight staff will be reviewing and analyzing reform recommendations as prepared by our peers, like OMBWatch, the Constitution Project, or the Sunshine in Government Initiative.

While the recently envigorated world of transition white papers can be dauntingly complex, as even a quick look at our Congresspedia page on transition resources will attest, we believe that policy is at its best when it’s developed and discussed in public.

Many of the recommendations we’ll be reviewing have been prepared by large communities of experts and stakeholders, and we want to be sure that all of their hard work gets the exposure it deserves.

To make it easier to follow along as the posts are published, all of the policy review posts will be tagged “policyreview,” which you can see through this page, or you can just watch for “PolicyReview” in the title of Sunlight blog posts.

We expect to learn a great deal by going through all of the detailed recommendations prepared for the incoming administration, and we hope that you will too.