Open Government: Transparent Complexity

The federal government is really running with President Obama’s transparency mandate.

Setting aside a few controversial decisions to hold certain material back for specific reasons [torture photos, for instance], agencies are hard at the task of opening up the government to let citizens see what’s inside.

Witness the White House/National Academy of Public Administration’s Open Government Dialogue. It’s a public-private effort to figure out how to get the government to use social media technologies to increase citizen interaction.

Read the Office of Science and Technology’s blog summary of a recent effort to consolidate recent transparency-related brainstorming in order to nudge it toward action.

A complicated effort? A massive coordination challenge? You bet. Just take a look at the White House’s visual summary of the terrain that has been covered so far. This is, of course, just an excerpt.

This visual presentation of the process/output is itself much more transparency-enhancing than the companion texts, meeting notes, etc. But it illustrates this: The effort is huge and nobody should believe this is going to be easy.

An even simpler–which is to say, even more transparent–summary of recent federal transparency activities can be found at the White House’s Open Government Initiative webpage.

Check out the Innovations Gallery and the transparency timeline at the bottom of the home page.

Many Eyes on the Economic Stimulus: What Will They See?

ProPublica, a non-profit group funded by foundations and led by mainstream journalists to produce independent investigative work, has taken a big step into citizen reporting. The move is full of promise–and some peril.

The group’s “Adopt a Stimulus Project” invites volunteers to report in their own neighborhoods projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act–that’s the Obama administration’s plan to invest billions into a wide range of projects in order to keep people working and move federal dollars into the private economy.

The AARA has been portrayed as both an engine of economic growth and a pork-laden boondoggle. ProPublica is enlisting citizens to provide surveillance.

How it works:

• Citizens go to the ProPublica website and “adopt” a nearby ARRA project
• They visit the actual job site, gathering facts and observations and delivering them to ProPublica’s staff of veteran journalists
• ProPublica’s team uses the reportage to develop ARRA accountability stories for local and national audiences.

The need for well-informed analysis of such a huge government spending program is obvious. The administration’s “transparent” recovery.gov effort provides a positive spin. Opposition reports deride the effort.  Balanced assessments are few.

The Promise The volunteers can conduct far more primary field reporting than even the best-funded newsrooms. This is classic crowd-sourcing, where armies of people can [presumably] produce more value and intelligence than teams of professionals.

The Peril Raw reportage of uneven quality and filtered inevitably through a single active citizen’s bias needs intensive fact-checking, additional reporting and contexualizing if it’s to serve the public properly. Can ProPublica provide this for hundreds of ARRA projects? The promise of crowd-sourcing is scalability–that an effort can benefit from the imput of hundreds, if not thousands, of sources. But if a huge amount of granular reportage still needs to be filtered though experienced journalists’ brains bit by bit. . .well, that’s unlikely to scale to a project as ambitious as tracking the ARRA.

The Context Take a look at this excellent Washington Post report that appeared recently, looking at one of the first Washington, D.C.-area ARRA projects. In addition to checking out the site and tallying jobs vs. spending, the reporter [interest revealed: my former colleague and pal Steve Hendrix] looked at how the workers who were getting hired spent the money. Turns out it’s not on driving economic growth. Many are simply paying off debts. Useful and vital? Yes. Stimulative? Not so much.

The Post piece is subtle, ambitious–and expensive–professional reporting, devoted to a single ARRA project in a single town. Can a partially crowd-sourced plan deliver similar value?

We’ll see. Meantime, it’s encouraging that ProPublica is undertaking something that will help answer the question.