Washington, DC – On Wednesday, ACT hosted an event entitled “Moving from e-Government to We-Government: Creating Processes for Transparency and Openness” in Washington, DC.  The event focused on the practical issues that must be addressed in order to improve the transparency of government, and featured Andrew Plemmons Pratt of the Center for America Progress (CAP), Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and Braden Cox of ACT.

“An open and transparent government can only be achieved through a process, not a simple product,” said Braden Cox during his opening statements.  Braden suggested the technology can help facilitate a more open and transparent government, but it cannot bring it about on its own.  

Braden suggested that ideally open government efforts would lead toward:

  • Access—and we mean meaningful access –the ability for citizens and developers to easily view, download, and utilize information that is searchable and easily categorized. 
  • Participation—regular opportunities for citizens to communicate with their government.
  • Accountability—mechanisms for citizens to critique policymakers on their votes, decisions, and policy directions. For example, members of Congress who know their earmarks will be easily viewable and comparable may show greater restraint.
Jerry and Andrew both largely agreed with this premise and the panel spent most of their time discussing both benefits of enabling open access to government data and documents and the steps necessary to make it a fundamental reality.

“Access to the information itself is useful and important, but it is the interpretations that are the most valuable,” said Andrew.   All three panelists agreed that government data needs to be provided in ways that enable communities and stakeholders to recombine and analyze it in new and novel ways.  

“Before that can happen, there are some operational changes inside government that have to be addressed before making that information available in a timely and accessible manner becomes the default way of doing business,” said Andrew.

Everyone agreed that it would take a long time before all the massive amounts of government data are made completely accessible.  Andrew and Braden highlighted that some of the information is buried in legacy systems like mainframes and IBM Domino databases that are not setup to provide full, timely access to the public.

Jerry Brito went further by demonstrating some of the ways he and his colleagues are already using some of government information.  He discussed two websites of his, Stimuluswatch.org and another site he’ll launch next week, Openregs.com, and demonstrated how data can become useable when it’s accessible.  His websites both use openly available government data and turn it into something that is useable and understandable to citizens, and even helping them to become more involved (by giving more information about stimulus projects and voting on their importance at StimulusWatch).