Who's Lobbying Whom?

One of the frustrating things about being on the side of right, justice, logic and the rest is that all of these are trumped by naked insider power - just look at ACTA, which is a monument to closed-door deals that include rich and powerful industry groups, but expressly exclude the little people like you and me.

Against that background, it becomes easy to understand why Larry Lessig decided to move on from promoting copyright reform to tackling corruption in the US political machine. The rise of great sites like the Sunlight Foundation, whose tagline is "Making Government Transparent and Accountable" is further evidence of how much effort is going into this in the US.

The UK is lagging somewhat, despite the fact that in terms of pure open data from government sources, we're probably "ahead". But it's clear that more and more people are turning their thoughts to this area - not least because they have made the same mental journey as Lessig: we've got to do this if we are to counter the efforts of big business to get what they want regardless of whether it's right, fair or even sensible.

Here's a further sign of progress on this side of the pond:

We are excited to announce the Who’s Lobbying site launches today! The site opens with an analysis of ministerial meetings with outside interests, based on the reports released by UK government departments in October.

That analysis consists of treemaps - zoomable representations of how much time is spent with various organisations and their lobbyists:

For example, the treemap shows about a quarter of the Department of Energy and Climate Change meetings are with power companies. Only a small fraction are with environmental or climate change organisations.

It's still a little clunky at the moment, but it gives a glimpse of what might be possible: a quick and effortless consolidated picture of who's getting chummy with whom. As the cliché has it, knowledge is power, and that's certainly the case here: the more we can point to facts about disproportionate time spent with those backing one side of arguments, the easier it will be to insist on an equal hearing. And once that happens, we will be halfway there; after all, we *do* have right on our side...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Building on Open Data

One of the great things about openness is that it lets people do incredible things by adding to it in a multiplicity of ways. The beatuy is that those releasing material don't need to try to anticipate future uses: it's enough that they make it as open as possible Indeed, the more open they make it, the more exciting the re-uses will be.

Here's an unusual example from the field of open data, specifically, the US government data held on Data.gov:

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

Here's how someone intends to go even further:

Today I’m happy to announce Sunlight Labs is stealing an idea from our government. Data.gov is an incredible concept, and the implementation of it has been remarkable. We’re going to steal that idea and make it better. Because of politics and scale there’s only so much the government is going to be able to do. There are legal hurdles and boundaries the government can’t cross that we can. For instance: there’s no legislative or judicial branch data inside Data.gov and while Data.gov links off to state data catalogs, entries aren’t in the same place or format as the rest of the catalog. Community documentation and collaboration are virtual impossibilities because of the regulations that impact the way Government interacts with people on the web.

We think we can add value on top of things like Data.gov and the municipal data catalogs by autonomously bringing them into one system, manually curating and adding other data sources and providing features that, well, Government just can’t do. There’ll be community participation so that people can submit their own data sources, and we’ll also catalog non-commercial data that is derivative of government data like OpenSecrets. We’ll make it so that people can create their own documentation for much of the undocumented data that government puts out and link to external projects that work with the data being provided.

This the future.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Open Government: the Latest Member of the Open Family

One of the most exciting developments in the last few years has been the application of some of the core ideas of free software and open source to completely different domains. Examples include open content, open access, open data and open science. More recently, those principles are starting to appear in a rather surprising field: that of government, as various transparency initiatives around the world start to gain traction....

On Linux Journal.

Towards Transparency for Europe

Regular readers of this blog will have spotted that I've been posting more about transparency recently. Of course, it's a natural extension of openness, and can equally be thought of as open government. Whatever you call it, it's apparently problematic for some people:

In the run-up to the European elections, some websites are trying to monitor MEPs according to their attendance in plenary sessions and committee meetings. But in practice the task is proving extremely difficult. EurActiv France contributed to this report.

Last week, one such website, www.parlorama.eu, was forced to shut down after its initiator was flooded with complaints from MEPs.

Flavien Deltort, a former MEP's assistant from Italy, had attempted to rate parliamentarians according to their attendance in plenary sessions, committee meetings and broader participation in parliamentary life.

But only two days after launching his website last week, Deltort was forced to close it down "due to the overwhelming volume of complaints". Threatened with prosecution by many MEPs, he decided to temporary close the website.

Although some of that prickleness may have been justified, I think it also shows that here in Europe we have a long way to go before we achieve open government. The US is already ahead, with campaigners like Larry Lessig working hard to make things more transparent, as well as splendid organisations like the Sunlight Foundation:

Our goal through our grant-making, blogging, projects, and technical leadership, is to use the power of the Internet to shine a light on the interplay of money, lobbying, influence and government in Washington in ways never before possible.

We need something similar here in Europe, but it looks like it's going to be a struggle to achieve that.

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody.

Top 10 Measurements for Open Government

One of the most exciting applications of openness in recent months has been to government. A year ago, open government was sporadic and pretty forlorn as a field; today it is flourishing, notable under the alternative name of "transparency". At the forefront of that drive is the Sunlight Foundation, which has just published a suggested top 10 measurements of just how open a government real is:

1. Open data: The federal government should make all data searchable, findable and accessible.

2. Disclose spending data: The government should disclose how it is spending taxpayer dollars, who is spending it and how it’s being spent.

3. Procurement data: How does the government decide where the money is getting spent, who gets it, how they are spending it and how can we measure success.

4. Open portal for public request for information: There should be a central repository for all Freedom of Information Act requests that are public to that people can see in real time when the requests come in, how fast the government responds to them.

5. Distributed data: The government should make sure it builds redundancy in their system so that data is not held in just one location, but held in multiple places in case of a disaster, terrorist attack or some other reason where the data is damaged. Redundancy would guarantee government could rebuild the data for future use.

6. Open meetings: Government meetings should be open to the public so that citizens can tell who is trying to influence government. All schedules should be published as soon as they happen so that people can see who is meeting with whom and who is trying to influence whom.

7. Open government research: Currently, when government conducts research, it usually does not report the data it collects until the project is finished. Government should report its research data while its being collected in beta form. This would be a measure of transparency and would change the relationship that people have to government research as it is being collected.

8. Collection transparency: Government should disclose how it is collecting information, for whom are they collecting the data, and why is it relevant. The public should have the ability to judge whether or not it valuable to them, and giving them the ability to comment on it.

9. Allowing the public to speak directly to the president: Recently, we saw the president participate in something called “Open for Questions,” where he gave the public access to ask questions. This allowed him to burst his bubble and be in touch with the American public directly is another measure of transparency.

10. Searchable, crawl able and accessible data: If the government were to make all data searchable, crawl able and accessible we would go along way in realizing all the goals presented at the Gov 2.0 Camp.

Great stuff, exciting times. Now, if only the UK government could measure up to these....

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody