Transparency Camp .1 #tcamp09
Heather and I ventured to Google headquarters this weekend. The Sunlight Foundation is sponsoring an amazing unconference called “Transparency Camp“. Loosely, it’s a gathering of about 150 people who are interested in bringing transparency to government.
Some folks call this Government 2.0. There’s a sort of focus and a sort of absence of focus. That’s what makes it an unconference, I think. The focus is mostly about introducing accountability by making government data available to do that.
Well, actually, it’s not even government data. An awful lot of the conversation is actually about data about the government. Voting patterns, lobbying influence trends, legislative behavior are all hot topics. It’s like the muckraking virus lost its host over at journalism and is hunting for a new dog to infect.
That’s not meant as an assault on the venture. A fair number of the people who are in this unstructured conversation are interested in accountability in the policing sense. There’s less emphasis on using the data to navigate or steer the working government.
Part of the problem emerges from a fundamental organizational misunderstanding.
In the US, we have four components to government: Legislative, Executive, Judicial and the citizens. The conference rightly understands that behavioral data, properly examined, can disclose bias and trend in the decision maing process. But, that’s almost exclusively a legislative issue.
Each of the major federal agencies is responsible for a huge slug of the national economy. More than 1/3 of the workforce is employed by the government. The real action, in my opinion, is bringing sunlight to the bowels of the big agencies.
