Transparency is Bunk

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/transparencybunk

by twampss • 17 years ago

75 24 17 years ago

josefresco• 17 years ago

"The real action is buried in obscure subchapters of innocuous-sounding bills and voted on under emergency provisions that let everything happen without public disclosure."

Doesn't sound like transparency to me. The authors point seems to be that efforts to be transparent, aren't actually. If Congress and others are hiding the 'good stuff', we need to work on making that transparent.

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

Real transparency would amount to such a large change in the system that it's unrealistic to think it can be tacked on. The scope of work is too large.

eli7• 17 years ago

Yeah, it sounds hard so we probably shouldn't even try.

quoderat• 17 years ago

Or maybe Congress should meet for a few days every few years, so only the really important things ever get worked on.

scottdw2• 17 years ago

That would never work. To start with, you can't stop members of Congress from associating with each other. If you said "you get one week every 2 years to pass everything", the entire congress would spend 1 year and 51 weeks in secret meetings trying to figuring out what to vote for in their 1 week of voting time.

All that would happen as a result is there would be a 2 year back log of legislation, and it would take FOREVER for anything to get done.

The only real way to deal with corruption in government is to limit it's power. As long as there are people in power, some of them are going to become corrupt. That's just human nature. The best you can do is limit power, so that the damage they can do is minimized.

cjoh• 17 years ago

What Aaron doesn't give due attention to here is that improving existing government transparency is part of a larger information ecosystem. Digitizing previously paper-bound and siloed databases makes possible a new kind of "connect-the-dots" work that used to take investigative journalists months to do--or they simply didn't even try. His own project, Watchdog.net, has pioneered a new way of finding links, or "handshakes" as he called it, between campaign contributors and congressional earmarks, and the demographic data he's cataloged is going to help power new tools for investigative types to answer such questions as "How many members of Congress who represent districts where X percent of their households have experienced a foreclosure last year voted for the banking bailout?"

We're just at the beginning of a new wave of data- and citizen-empowered watchdogging of government, and it would be a huge mistake to discount how valuable these government transparency projects are in opening up the process in fundamentally new ways. Yes, it's true that government still wants to hide its dirt and the data it discloses is often only part of the picture. But the more we open access to the existing data and involve people in connecting the dots, the greater the appetite and demand for even more transparency, of the sort even Aaron might find useful.

(My collegue Micah Sifry wrote this with me)

eli7• 17 years ago

Indeed, and there are real examples of local reporters uncovering corrupt congressman based on data in these public records. This is a lot harder if they have to travel to DC and sit in a basement reading room to pore over paper ledgers.

silentOpen• 17 years ago

Where 'harder' is 'more expensive' and we know that the present newspaper model doesn't look like it can support expensive endeavors. Investigative journalism in the info age is only possible if those practicing it have info age tools.

boris• 17 years ago

This assumes that the public databases actually contain any information that will allow you to connect the dots. Aaron's claim seems to be that they mostly contain fluff that has nothing to do with the actual functioning of the government. That's why you have to investigate and uncover rather than simply analyze to get to the truth.

brandnewlow• 17 years ago

Yes. Yhe definition of the word "news" has been expanded to include anything that seems new. The other way of looking at it is to limit it to "things someone doesn't want you to announce." The argument in this article is that these databases are full only of data that people want you to announce. So how useful can it really be?

pradocchia• 17 years ago

> We're just at the beginning of a new wave of data- and citizen-empowered watchdogging of government

Back in the mid 90s, a company called Hamilton Securities created an online tool for analyzing flows of government money at the local level. It didn't work out so well for them:

http://www.dunwalke.com/11_Hamilton_Securities.htm

Much has changed since then. It's still going to be hard slog.

eli7• 17 years ago

Databases of campaign contributions and legislative data are just tools. Posting the data (which is supposedly already "public," but is often hidden in a basement somewhere) online doesn't sprinkle fairy dust over the capital.

But people can (and do) use these tools to write books like the ones he links, and to pull data from different sources to uncover specific acts of corruption and malfeasance.

Databases are just as useful to reporters and authors as anonymous leaks and insider sources.

eli7• 17 years ago

And that linked Sunlight Foundation essay at the bottom seems awfully ad hominem.

Transparency is Bunk

Related Stories