Beyond Mere Transparency: How Broadband Technologies Impact Openness and E-Governance at the Local, State and Federal Levels

Beyond Mere Transparency: How Broadband Technologies Impact Openness and E-Governance at the Local, State and Federal Levels

As government entities at every level—local, state and federal—increasingly support and embrace the use of ICTs and information platforms to move beyond analog era notions of transparency, innovators in the public and private sectors are seizing the opportunity to have a stake in the outcomes of once hidden government processes. This next section provides an overview of some of the most innovative approaches to inform future initiatives in this space.

The Open Government Directive

At the federal level, the Obama administration has developed the Open Government Directive to implement a bold vision for Internet technologies to both enhance transparency and move beyond it. This initiative has two principal parts: an inward-facing component meant to use technology to enhance the business of government and an outward-facing component that uses technology to more actively engage citizens. The latter began with an appeal for public input during the drafting of an open government plan. The open government team outlined a process whereby the public, through various stages of drafting and editing, could suggest ideas, concepts, and specific language for inclusion in the White House’s official open government policy. In a progress report issued in December 2009, President Obama noted that this approach to openness was helping his administration “mov[e] forward with broad measures to translate the values of openness into lasting improvements in the way government makes decisions, solves problems, and addresses national challenges” (White House, 2009). Several other outward-facing initiatives have been launched since, including an IT Dashboard that allows the public to monitor technology expenditures and an Innovations Gallery that invites the public to submit innovative approaches that use new Internet technologies to enhance the openness of government (see Appendix for URLs).

The inward-facing component of the Open Government Directive requires executive agencies and departments to meet deadlines for publishing government information online, improving the quality of the information, creating a culture of open government and creating a policy framework to support open government (OMB, 2009). The results to date have been decidedly mixed. A study of 29 federal agencies’ open government plans revealed that agencies with a strong public-facing mission (e.g., the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency) have created purposeful open government plans, while other agencies, including the Department of Justice and the Office of Management and Budget, are struggling to develop a suitable plan (OpenTheGovernment.org, 2010, & Vijayan, 2010).

The federal government also targets initiatives that facilitate richer public participation. NASA has numerous plans underway to permit the public to participate in the exploration of Mars and to develop new technologies. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has a separate initiative, in collaboration with the New York Law School, to expand its Peer-to-Patent system, which has crowdsourced the patent-review process by allowing citizen experts to review specific types of patent applications, all in an effort to clear the massive backlog of un-reviewed submissions (Noveck, 2009). Finally, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) embraced the concept of openness during the development of the National Broadband Plan. Over the course of about a year, the FCC connected with some 335,000 citizens through YouTube, Facebook and Twitter; simulcasts of workshops in Second Life; online participation in public workshops; and online public feedback forums (Cohen, 2010). The final report reflected not only the formal written input of tens of thousands of commentators, but also of the many thousands of other citizens who submitted comments to the FCC broadband blog, who edited portions of draft text via IdeaScale and submitted questions and comments during web-casted public hearings and workshops.

While the use of such collaborative tools can have implications on accessibility, privacy and cost, what we are seeing are new ways to promote information access, garner greater citizen participation and support collaboration. However, three concerns emerge in these efforts. First, federal agencies need to do a better job of making data available in formats that are easier to retrieve and search. Indeed, this is a key step in moving beyond transparency at the federal level. While the U.S. Department of the Census for example, has long been the standard bearer for publishing raw data sets, several other agencies have taken the Obama administration’s open government challenge to heart. The FCC, for example, has begun to publish an array of new data sets and make existing data much more user-friendly. The Spectrum Dashboard is one such data set that allows the public to more easily identify who owns various portions of the airwaves and how those owners are using the spectrum (OBI, 2010). Of concern is the assurance that transparency does not result in the degradation in the quality of that information, for example, by rendering it too technical, out of date, inaccurate, or incompatible with other data sets. If government also ensures that the data is properly tagged with meaning and produced in raw, structured, machine-readable form, the data will be capable of being ported into a wide variety of current and future analytical tools (Berners-Lee, 2010).

The second concern is that next generation transparency in open government initiatives relies on the public being able to access structured data through readily available software programs. This permits the public to know and understand the data, its logic and code structure (Brito, 2009). In many cases, data is often too difficult to search, especially when content is embedded. Some private firms have become conduits through which esoteric or hard-to-use data are filtered and made more useful to the public. For example, sites such as GovTrack use methods to do screen-scrapes.1 GovTrack reports how members of Congress voted and the sources of campaign contributions that they have received.

The data is available electronically, but not in structured formats that permit easy use by the public. Teams of programmers essentially copy the data from a website and reformat into XML, a data structure format. While the data can be used by anyone once in this format, the process itself is very labor and time intensive, and it does not guarantee complete capture of the data. As previously stated, spending the time to properly tag the data and produce it in a machine-readable form might be an easier solution to data transfer and interpretation.

Lastly, federal agencies must be creative in soliciting more feedback from citizens on the data that should be made available in the Open Government Directive. Assuming that citizens know how to identify the problems affecting them, open government initiatives should be a catalyst for civic engagement. At the federal level, citizens must not only be able to assess the productivity of government agencies but also make them more accountable. The public should also contribute ideas to enhance or resolve national issues such as the economy, the state of education or employment. This type of civic engagement and participation fosters a new level of transparency that promotes more involvement at the grassroots level. Federal agencies can also bridge their information needs with those of state and local governments to potentially drive traffic and interest in their content. Recovery.gov, the website whose mission is to track and publish activities from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, is an effort to avoid potential fraud, waste and abuse, promote contracting opportunities and jobs across the country, and connect federal efforts with state and local governments. While federal sites like Recovery.gov have links to popular social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the information is still pushed down to local citizens and does not encourage the public to offer suggestions and strategies for solving some of the nation’s critical problems.

State and Local Government Efforts

Not surprisingly, citizens are more likely to be more engaged with government portals at the state and local levels. Local governments have made data available to the public via the Internet since the mid-1990s. For example, it has long been commonplace to get local tax information, crime statistics, economic development plans and traffic information from local and state government websites, much in the way that citizens could access basic federal data via the web several years ago. Today, more local governments are also broadcasting council meetings, distributing speeches and press releases, and sharing outcomes on legislation.

In his paper addressing the Knight Commission’s recommendation to create online local hubs or community portals, Adam Thierer shares research from the Center for Digital Government (Center for Digital Government, 2010) that suggests that local governments should do even more to improve their digital records of

• Pending and enacted legislation
• Government projects and spending
• Video (live and archived) of all legislative activities and public meetings
• Court developments and records, as well as crime data
• Public health and safety information
• Information about other government benefits and services, licenses, registrations, forms, fines, events, activities, etc.

On the consumer side, Pew American and Internet Life Project’s Government Online survey supports this view in its finding that 81 percent of Internet users have looked for this information or completed a transaction on a government website in the past year, as Exhibit I shows (Smith, 2010). And according to Pew, 51 percent of Internet users completed their intended transaction on a government web site. These data are illustrative examples of how government can facilitate key partnerships with its citizenry, especially when so many individuals look for information or complete transactions on a government web site.

Whereas the early analog/Web 1.0 days of open government depended on one-way communications to the public, Web 2.0 and 3.0 versions of open government at the local and state levels parallel federal efforts. Increasingly, state and local governments are engaging the public as viable stakeholders and partners, opening the technological barriers to the data and services and making government a platform for change.

From coast to coast, there are examples in cities large and small where open data websites permit users ready access to a large and growing portfolio of data.

• The Massachusetts Department of Transportation and the Chicago Transit Authority have made their transit data public in order to permit real-time sharing of data about arrival times of buses and trains. Both transit agencies are also crowdsourcing the development of web and smartphone applications to permit the public to get information about the arrival times, routes and other service information. Developers use the data feeds to mashup with Google Maps and develop additional applications for the public.

• Capitol Hill Seattle, an online news source, connects to a public city data set on designated heritage trees (“the oldest, largest, or most unique tree of that species in the city or neighborhood in which it resides”), and has created a map of historically significant trees in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington (Durkin, J., Glaisyer, T. & Hadge, K., 2010).

On-the-ground partnerships are also being established at the local level. The organization Code for America (CFA) is an emerging example of collaboration between governments and the private sector. Piloting its program in five cities, CFA’s mission is to “help city governments become more transparent, connected and efficient by connecting the talents of cutting-edge web developers with people who deliver city services and want to embrace the transformative power of the web to achieve more impact with less money”. Mirroring the service model of Teach for America, the organization matches city officials with web developers to create more robust city applications.

Citizen Application Contests

Among the most widely noted approaches for using new technologies for open government purposes at the local government level are application development contests. In New York, the city’s Big Apps Contest has helped launch innovative government applications. Washington, D.C.’s Apps for Democracy contest has been at the forefront of this movement.

The Apps for Democracy Contest was launched in 2008 to invite residents from Washington, D.C., to design and build applications using government information from its open data feeds. The goal of the contest was “to engage the populace of Washington, D.C., to ask for their input into the problems and ideas they have that can be addressed with technology and then to build the best community platform for submitting urgent city service requests such as snow plowing, potholes, etc..” In its first year, the contest generated 47 web, iPhone, and Facebook applications.

When asked about the program, Vivek Kundra, the former Chief Technology Officer for Washington, D.C., said, “by making government data easy for everyone to access and use, the District hopes to foster citizen participation in government, drive private-sector technology innovation and growth, and build a new model for government-private sector collaboration that can help all governments address the technology challenges of today and tomorrow” (OCTO, 2008).

Submissions were built by leveraging data from the Washington, D.C. government data catalog and mashing it up with new technologies and Internet tools. The D.C. Data Catalog currently offers 435 data sets from multiple agencies in open data formats. Users access the data through an Internet subscription to a live data feed in these formats. The data feeds provide content describing a range of services, including 311 service requests, crime data for youth and adults, current construction projects, and public space permits. The winning applications in the first year of the contest included: DC Historic Tour, and iLive.at.

The following were the top three contest winners in the second round:

• vacantDC, which mapped all vacant buildings in the city

• An iPhone application using DC 311 API to permit users to submit services to fix broken street lights, report abandoned vehicles and get more information about trash collections
• SeeClickFix, an honorable-mention application that permits anyone to report and track non-emergency issues such as a pothole, graffiti and parking meters through the local government.

Peter Corbett, the head of iStrategy Labs, the organization that helped develop and administer Apps for Democracy, reported that the $50,000 contest in D.C. returned some $2,300,000 in value to the city.

But not all of these approaches are a panacea. While the applications created via Apps for Democracy initially generated a lot of buzz for getting the public engaged with local government, several concerns remain. First, some worry about the sustainability of these efforts, especially for small and mid-sized cities. What happens once the prize money is gone? Second, the usefulness of some of these applications has been questioned. What is cool or cutting-edge might not be of practical use to citizens. These concerns have forced Washington, D.C., to discontinue its Apps for Democracy contest and rethink its approach to engaging the expertise of the public (Nichols, 2010).

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