Obstacles to Open Government
From small local agencies to sprawling federal departments, governments across the country are using the web to make more information available to citizens. Activists and software companies envision a new era of government accountability. But they're grappling with a range of technical and philosophical obstacles. Tech Tuesday explores the roles and responsibilities of governments, software developers and activists.
Guests
Director of Government Solutions, Adobe Systems
Director of Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation
Chief Technology Officer, Fig Leaf Software
Information on "Open Government"
President Barack Obama has pledged to make government more transparent through the White House's "Open Government Initiative". On January 21, 2009, President Obama released his Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.
Adobe has recently launched an ad campaign promoting Open Government solutions.They have also produced a White Paper on Open Government (in pdf, of course), entitled"An opportunity for
the US Government."
Clay Johnson has criticized government use of PDF's and Adobe Flash, arguing that "Adobe is Bad for Open Government."
Reading H.R. 3962- Affordable Health Care for America Act
On October 29th, 2009, the House of Representatives passed H.R.3962 - Affordable Health Care for America Act, by a vote of 220- 215.
H.R. 3962 is available in full text --all 1,990 pages of it-- in a number of official outlets. You can find it through the Library of Congress' "Thomas" system. You can also access a PDF from the Government Printing Office.
Third-party sites have made the text available in different formats. Open Congress has posted full text of H.R. 3962 on their site, in a searchable format. Govtrack.us has also posted H.R. 3962.
Maplight.org has taken the voting records of House members and cross-referenced them with campaign contribution information.
Government Sites
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Data.gov "increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets."
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Grants.gov "A central storehouse for information on over 1,000 grant programs and provides access to approximately $500 billion in annual awards."
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Federal IT Dashboard"provides the public with an online window into the details of Federal information technology investments and provides users with the ability to track the progress of investments over time."
Definitions and Jargon from the Show
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XML (Extensive Markup Language) "a simple... flexible text format.... Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere." from w3.org Also see Wikipedia's definition.
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API (Application Programming Interface) "Publishing APIs has allowed web communities to create an open architecture for sharing of content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place can be dynamically posted and/or updated in multiple locations on the web." from Wikipedia.
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PDF (Portable Document Format) "a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.... Formerly a proprietary format, PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization." from Wikipedia. Also, information on the history of the PDF can be found on the Adobe website, here.
Comments
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Daniel Bennett from eCitizen Foundation. Although most legislation is written in XML, not all of it is and often the amending process. Unless it is in XML to start with it is not available in XML, but if in XML it does get published. Also, PDF can embed the XML version. And publishing in HTML is little better if it is not valid or parsable (see: http://validator.w3.org/ ).
What is important in the future is moving to the ability to cite any law with a URL. Also the semantic understanding should be incorporated so that the information more easily cited, searched and mashed up.
Also, XML can be found authentic both using the same digital certificates and having a link directly to an XHTML version at an authentic, authoritative link.
Daniel
see also:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-gov-data-20090908/
Hi Daniel-- thanks for flagging those resources. The question of "authenticity" generated a lot of feedback. I wonder if there is follow-up topic there for Tech Tuesday
Brendan (KNS Producer)
Authenticity, authoritative and identity are all tied together, and in the physical world we have a real sense of them. But in the electronic or virtual world these are murkier, in part because it is hard to draw parallels that work. This was the case when I drafted the Government Paperwork Elimination Act of 1998 which was the first federal legislation making electronic signatures legally valid. And 10 years later, it is still as difficult to understand the difference between an autograph versus what an electronic signature is for many despite better technology.
There are some ways forward, for example, we now depend on web links and generally trust that if a document is on a government site, it was published by the government. For, example, if someone says, "I got this from https://govsite.gov/document.html#fragment ," then we all can compare what they have versus the "authoritative" source.
Also, government is going to use OpenID (also ICard) which uses control/authority over a web page to convey authenticity. For example, a URL for my identity is https://citizencontact.myopenid.com/ . If you know I "control"/own that page you can "trust" that it is me that you are doing business/etc.
Daniel
for more see:
http://advocatehope.org/tech-tidbits/reliable-electronic-citations
http://docs.google.com/Revs?id=dfxgcdfc_86gfjgmrdv&tab=revlist (working draft)