CSC 379 SUM2008:Week 4, Group 2

Open Government

Most bills are passed by legislatures without ever being read by most legislators. Letters, articles, reports, all often never escape the physical mediums (paper) of their existence. Although technology has developed to the point where all non-private information in the United States government can, in theory, be made openly available, the support structures and culture of information sharing has not caught up to make full use of them. Efforts are being made to use digitization and sharing technology; one of the most notable digitization efforts is THOMAS, a joint effort by the Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office (GPO).

Examine the ethical implications of making policy with inadequate access to information, and the efforts being made to address those concerns. Is there a need for a change in existing support structures and culture of information sharing in government? Should support structures and culture change to encourage greater information sharing, if it required the government to slow down decision-making processes?

History

Open government is the doctrine that all levels of political administration should be open to public viewing and scrutiny. The origins of which date back to the Enlightenment in Europe in the eighteenth century. More recently, the passing of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the United States in 1966 is seen as the beginning of a modern movement toward open government. After its passing, several countries have followed suit in the subsequent decades.

The FOIA allows for complete or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents from the US Government based on a series of conditions. It applies to all government agencies. There are nine exemptions to the FOIA:

• Classified national defense and foreign relations information
• Internal agency rules and practices
• Information that is prohibited from disclosure by another federal law
• Trade secrets and other confidential business information
• Inter-agency or intra-agency communications protected by legal privileges
• Information involving matters of personal privacy
• Records compiled for law enforcement purposes
• Information relating to the supervision of financial institutions
• Geological information on wells

THOMAS is a database kept by the Library of Congress detailing legislative information since 1995. The database is named after Thomas Jefferson. It includes information including:

• Bills and resolutions
• Congressional activity
• Congressional record
• Committee information
• Treaties
• Historical documents

A new political philosophy is open source governance, which details a post-national state where any interested citizen can add to the creation of a policy, by way of a wiki or another mechanism. The core of such a government structure is a "central codebase" that are maintained by public registry. The policies are distributed to local areas that can alter the policy for their own uses and can send improvements back to the core.

Benefits

One of the advantages of an open source government is that more of the government's actions and intentions become transparent by posting reports about said activity in a widely accessible place (such as the internet). This gives a much wider range of people the opportunity to decide for themselves if they actually support what their leaders and representatives are doing.

For example, one common problem with bills is that they typically get "riders," which are extra provisions that are appended to the bill and may or may not have anything to do with the original intent of the bill. Typically they are used to covertly pass items through the bill-approval process that would otherwise be met with opposition. At this time, the threat of being discovered is minimal because the riders tend to be written in a very verbose, jargon-fill manner, which very few people are willing to examine and interpret.

It is not really a question of how to obtain access to information about these bills and various attachments. All of this information is available to the general public (e.g. via THOMAS); anyone is well within their bounds to perform their own research. It is more a question of how to obtain access to this information that is easily digestible and understandable. As stated, the wording of bills can be very confusing. Not everyone has the time or the inclination to sit down and understand what a bill is meant to accomplish. People have access to the information, they just don't have access to the abridged version of that information.

Open source governance would help to change that by first bringing together individuals and interest groups (such as the Sunlight Foundation[1]) who do have the patience to analyze bills and riders. By cooperating and collaborating, these individuals can better coordinate their efforts and disseminate their findings to a wider audience. Once a larger percentage of the the general population is more aware of what is contained in the bills, they will be better informed and be able to make sound decisions on whether or not they support what sorts of things are included in the bills.

In theory, this would reduce the amount of riders that get passed through, because law-makers would have a more difficult time passing things through that might not necessarily have popular support. At a minimum, they would be more mindful of what sorts of things they choose to include in a bill because a responsive and well-informed populace would quickly voice their opposition to anything objectionable.

Problems

Although the idea of allowing this information to be viewed by many people sounds great, there are many potential problems.

• Funding

Funding is probably the larget problem with open government. Many people tend to overlook the cost of getting these documents transfered from a paper form to internet, user-friendly, model. Also, where would this money come from? Would the government use the peoples tax dollars or would apprpriations from the national budget be made? With these costs tagged on to the nation's already tremendous national debt, the country would be faced with the decesion to either cut corners in other departments or plunge further into debt.

• Conflicting Interest

With all of the information availible to many people of different political backgrounds their is sure to be many conflicting interests. Many of the people reading the documents may not fully understand it's contents and become confused and/or angry about what the document is actully doing. Also, the interest groups that research the bills could be at risk by putting this information up for everyone to see. Readers of this information could start to disagree with these groups and the information that they are providing the government. With the disagreement of who is right and who is wrong, it would become increasingly difficult for legislators to propose new legislation.

• Time

The time span of creating these documents would be astronomic. Although there are current databases the contain important information for captial hill(stated above), the thought of putting all permitted information in a format accessible to all those interested in a reasonable timeframe, would be extreamly difficult.

Additional Links

• http://thomas.loc.gov/home/abt_thom.html
• http://www.lessig.org/blog/
• http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/announcement/digitizing-faqs.html
• http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/