Given enough eyeballs, all corruption is shallow

Thanks for visiting this blog for the first time. Check out the home page for the most recent posts, or the archives if you're looking for something in particular. Here are some of our favorite posts, which you might enjoy:

If you like what you see, we hope you'll consider subscribing to the RSS feed.

I’ve been laboring for a few months on a paper about government transparency on the internet and I’m happy to say that it’s now available as a working paper. In it I show that a lot of government information that is supposed to be publicly available is only nominally available because it’s not online. When data does make it online it’s often useless; it’s as if the .gov domain has a prohibition on XML and reliable searches.

First I look at independent third parties (such as GovTrack.us) that are doing yeoman’s work by picking up the slack where government fails and making data available online in flexible formats. Then I look at yet other third parties who are taking the liberated data and using them in mashups (such as MAPLight.org) and crowdsourcing (such as our own Jim Harper’s WashingtonWatch.com). Mashups of government data help highlight otherwise hidden connections and crowdsourcing makes light work of sifting through mountains of data. If I may corrupt Eric Raymond’s Linus’s Law for a moment, “Given enough eyeballs, all corruption is shallow.” In the coming days I plan to write a bunch more on how online tools can shed light on government, including a series dissecting the FCC’s website–not for the squeamish.

I believe opening up government to online scrutiny is immensely important. If we’re going to hold government accountable for its actions, we need to know what those actions are. The Sunlight Foundation has been doing fantastic work on this front and I would encourage you to visit them and especially their Open House Project blog. I would also encourage you to send me any comments you might have on my paper as I’m still perfecting it before I submit it to journals.

Oct 22, 2007 | Comments | Tags: , ,

Related entries

One comment posted

  1. Posted by Owen Ambur - 11/14/2007

    Thanks for pointing out the failure of .gov agencies to make effective use of XML. It is a point I have been trying to get across since 2000, when the CIO Council chartered the XML Working Group (now the xmlCoP). My current, best hope for more rapid and effective progress is Strategy Markup Language (StratML). AIIM’s Standards Board recently agreed to foster the establishment of StratML as an international voluntary consensus standard, for potential use not only by all .gov agencies but also all organizations, worldwide. Check out the StratML home page — http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm — and let me know if you’d like to participate.

    Owen Ambur
    Co-Chair Emeritus, xmlCoP http://xml.gov/
    Co-Chair, StratML CoP http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm
    Member, FIRM Board http://mysite.verizon.net/ambur/firmbod.html
    Member, AIIM iECM Committee http://www.aiim.org/standards.asp?ID=29284
    Former Project Manager, ET.gov http://et.gov/
    http://mysite.verizon.net/ambur/bio.htm

Subscribe to this entry's comments

Post a comment