Lessig urges caution in the drive towards government transparency. The perils of openness in government. |
The naked transparency movement marries the power of network technology to the radical decline in the cost of collecting, storing, and distributing data. Its aim is to liberate that data, especially government data, so as to enable the public to process it and understand it better, or at least differently. |
| How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. TRead more at www.tnr.com |
Transparency Site Reveals New York State and Municipal Salaries |
The Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy, which last year launched SeeThroughNY, a transparency site that revealed the salaries of all New York State employees, on Friday announced that it has added the municipal payroll files of all counties, cities, towns, villages and special districts in the state. |
| The site is controversial, as most public employees feel publishing their salaries by name is an invasion of privacy. Read more at www.govtech.com |
A Small Texas Town Gets Smart with Phones |
CIO -
The Project: Deploy quick response (QR) codes to the town of Manor, Texas (population 5,800), beginning with public records and expanding to historical sites, municipal buildings and police vehicles. QR codes are a type of bar code that can be read by an application available for download to most camera-equipped cell phones. Users scan the code, launching a webpage where they can learn more about the tagged item. |
| Haisler’s annual IT budget of less than $100,000 required him to get creative. He began by researching inexpensive document management solutions and discovered how QR codes were being used in Europe, China and Australia. There, applications to read the codes come standard on mobile phones. And the best part, Haisler learned, was that QR codes are nearly free. |
Organizing public sector information isn’t easy, and companies like Google rely on the good work of open government advocates to access useful data. Last weekend more than 150 developers, NGOs, wonks, activists and government representatives from as far away as Russia and Israel gathered at our Mountain View campus for Transparency Camp West to discuss efforts to make governments more transparent and accessible to the public. |
At Google we’re inspired by efforts to connect people to the political process, to useful public information and to their governments — and we’re eager to participate. To hear more about the different kinds of bottom-up change proposed at Transparency Camp, head to the Google Open Source blog for a summary by Clay Johnson from the Sunlight Foundation. |
Crowdsourcing Closer Government Scrutiny |
A new Web-based effort promises to track the sources of congressional earmarks, compile databases of the Twitter posts of state lawmakers, and add sharper perspective to the Obama administration’s open-government efforts. |
“Government puts out a ton of data that is really interesting about what it does, but people can’t understand it,” says Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, an arm of the open-government group Sunlight Foundation, based in Washington, DC. |
Transparency meets skepticism |
Industry, government reluctant to reveal much |
Many federal acquisition employees are at first ready to spread their work on the table for all to see, but the thought of the criticism that is certain to follow stops them from following through on the impulse, said Mary Davie, assistant commissioner for assisted acquisition services at the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service. She was speaking as part of a panel discussion July 21 at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington. |
“If you put something out there, somebody can say, ‘Good lord, why did you do it that way?’” Davie said. |
Many officials don’t want to face that question. Contracting officers have said they would prefer to do their work far away from the limelight, she said. Read more at fcw.com |
Singapore Minister: govts should embrace culture of transparency |
The citystate’s Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong said that good governance is the foundation for successful e-government, which in turns makes government more effective. However in order for a government to make the transformation to an e-government model, it needs to embrace “a culture of transparency, accountability and incorruptibility.”
Read more at www.futuregov.net |
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Against Transparency - the perils of openness in government
