(crossposted from Sunlight)

I’d like to elaborate on an important point about the IG reform measure that just passed the Senate. 

The measure includes a requirement that the Inspectors General post their reports on their Web sites.  This requirement places the responsibility of disclosure on the agencies themselves, rather than on citizens looking form information.  The wording of the mandate takes the language of the Freedom of Information Act, which puts the onus on citizens to request information, and uses it to set a standard of full disclosure of IG reports.

That the government should take responsibility for openness, or make disclosure the rule rather than the exception, is one of Ellen’s spotlight ideas; a completely open government would render FOIA unnecessary.

We’re happy to see such a specific requirement pass the Senate in the spirit of full digital access.

Boing Boing is quoting a talk by Clay Shirky on what they’re calling the “cognitive surplus”, or the amount of human thought not taken up by necessary pursuits.  (I think I’d call it “discretionary cognition”, for a financial comparison).  They calculate the human-thought-hours taken up by wikipedia, and find:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.

As we consider and build the tools that put political information online, we should remember that we’re tapping into something unimaginably vast; we get to help shape the answer of the question “what would all of those people be doing if they weren’t watching television?”.

Even if only a small amount of that leisure time gets connected to politics and government online, and it is well connected to the substance of oversight and legislation, of politics and elections, then democracy is going to go through a fundamental change.  TV can’t compete, and the sheer amount of human attention moving online and getting involved in participatory media has enough weight to shift both politics and government.  Even if one in 20,000 cares about a specific GAO report, that’s enough to make a drastic change, assuming people’s interests and abilities are led to those places where their attention matters.  To those places where their attention is important, where they can have some effect, where they can add to their knowledge, or to where their knowledge can be helpful.

Since coming across a CRS report on efforts to strengthen the Offices of Inspectors General (OIGs, and IGs), I’ve been interested in executive oversight structures and the laws that govern them. A section of PublicMarkup.org’s Transparency in Government Act even covers IG report publication. It looks like the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and Congress are also intently focused on the issue, as they’ve just passed a second version of a measure to strengthen Inspectors General.

POGO’s blog explains that the Senate just passed S. 2324 (GovTrack, OpenCongress), after, according to POGO,

For more background on IG reform, see especially POGO’s February report, Inspectors General: Many Lack Essential Tools for Independence.

Senator Lieberman is among those praising the measure, which still needs to be reconciled with the House version before going to the President.

S. 2324 would amend Title 5 of the US Code, significantly strengthening the independence and effectiveness of oversight by IGs.

Of particular interest to Sunlight is the provision that Inspectors General post copies of IG reports to their Web sites, (as long as they’re subject to FOIA, and therefore not classified or otherwise unfit for publication). The text:

Public reporting requirements are the stuff of public accountability and trust, and we’re happy to see such a requirement included in the passed version. In order to improve public access, the reports could be centralized (perhaps by the new IG oversight body, the “Integrity Committee of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency”, and then syndicated, which would let one subscribe to IG reports in the same way one can now subscribe to GAO reports.

It seems that Ari Schwartz from CDT like that idea too (from publicmarkup):

A central location for all IG reports from around the government is a great idea!

posted by Ari Schwartz, CDT at April 24, 2008

More concretely on digital permanence, the House Oversight Committee Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives held a hearing on Wednesday on digital preservation procedures for executive branch materials, HR 5811, or the “Electronic Communications Preservation Act” (as previewed by the American Association of Law Libraries blog).

Patrice McDermott of OpentheGovernment.org joined others from NARA and the GAO in testifying, and advised that the measure be strengthened to ensure that agencies comply with stricter digital records management procedures.

The subcommittee was receptive to the concerns of both NARA and the public access community (as represented by Dr. McDermott), and suggested they’d be willing to work with everyone involved to further shape the legislation.

At issue is whether the enforcement mechanisms are sufficient to the seriousness of the task, which is difficult, given what NARA sees as their limited mandate for enforcement. While NARA stressed guidelines and training over compliance monitoring, the complexity of the digital records challenge, and a recent report from CREW on substandard record-keeping policies both suggested the need for NARA to take a bigger role. The form of records enforcement is in question, however, given separation of powers issues (between both Congress and NARA and the rest of the executive branch).

Despite there being no clear solution to an apparent lack of effective information oversight on the executive branch, HR 5811 and the subcommittee’s seeming receptiveness to the issue are both steps in the right direction. As McDermott said, the cost of doing something about the problem doesn’t just need to be weighed against the benefits, but also against the cost of not doing something about it.

(If you’re looking for more info, be sure to read the testimony from the subcommittee page.)

I once heard a historian suggest that every Member of Congress should carry a digital recorder in their pocket, have it always turned on, and make a copy each night, to be released some years in the future, as a record of what they really did. This suggestion, while unlikely to be heeded, shows how much technology has changed what it means to be public, and what it means to be exposed, or even to be documented.

My high school English teacher used to bemoan the decline of the handwritten word, suggesting that notes that become artifacts have a certain permanence lacking in email. While I agree that handwriting contains a very personal element, and a more intimate presence, digital records are changing what we even think about as our history of ourselves. Jorge Luis Borges, as quoted in the April 2008 Harper’s:

Borges, purveyor of twisted metaphysical fiction, also appears in the research of Jonah Bossewitch, (slideshow, paper) who writes about personal information and authority in a digital age: “Unforgettable, in Every Way“.

From the surveillance gargoyles in Neil Stephensen’s Snow Crash, to Jeremy Bentham’s prison panopticon, from social networking to youtube and America’ Funniest Videos and Cops, from user-generated content to information reported by authorities, information access changes the way we witness ourselves.

On witness, here’s Rives on truth and learning, or what he calls a mockingbird in a mason jar:

Similar to the OMB page on IT regulations, (discussed here), NARA has a helpful collection of federal documents management guidelines, laws, and regulations.  Looking over the laws that govern the practical aspects of transparency leaves me predictably disappointed, however, in online access to legal information.  In trying to track down the Federal Records Act, the best I can find are agency specific explanations and citiations to the US Code, but no text of the Act itself, or any congressional reporting that accompanied it (which I would probably find the most helpful).

Even more confusing is how parts of the US Code are referred to as Acts, which aren’t the same as the acts that create them, but the result of congressional action.  This isn’t a small distinction; congressional action comes with documentation and explanation (committee reports, amendments, etc), and is liable to be changed over time.  This is similar to the difference between the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations; the first is chronological and the second is organized by topic (and the Register is more comprehensive in scope).

Making reference to the authorizing congressional action could certainly be helpful, but not when the only resource available online for understanding them is the US Code, and the Acts themselves (and the explanatory information that should accompany them) are simply unavailable.

Context is essential to lawmaking (and interpretation), which is why I’m such a fan of explanatory and linking mechanisms that give context, like the Constitution Annotated, or the publishing of committee testimony, transcripts, video, and especially congressional reports.  (and, again, why it’s a shame that the veracity of the Congressional Record is suspect.)

I’ll put the moral of this story up front: data is nice, but the problem is the media.

Today is the primary election in Pennsylvania, and I intend to go over to vote in a few minutes. But it occurred to me only this morning that more things may be on the ballot than the presidential nominees. To be a good citizen, I realized I had better read up on what else I will be voting on before strolling across the street to cast my ballot.

So what else is on the ballot? I figured the PA state website might have that information. Hah. I should only be so lucky. Googling I found CNN’s page only has presidential information; I found an AP article that mentions other candidates; and eventually some five pages of Google hits later I find that the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania seem to be the only group that has put this information online. Thanks to the LWV!

Fortunately some of the ballots are easy. The primary for the House and State Senate are uncontested in each party, and it looks like only one party even has a candidate for State House. (Lucky us.) I’m supposed to vote for state attorney general, auditor general, and treasurer. Each party has one candidate for the first two— another easy “choice.” (I presume these are all primaries and not actual elections for these offices, but the page doesn’t say.)

Then as I look down I find myself completely baffled. I’m supposed to elect pledged delegates to my party’s national convention?? Exactly what am I doing when I vote for either Clinton or Obama if I also have to choose delegates? (Ok, I just read an article in the Philly Inquirer explaining it.)

So I tell you, it’s just ridiculous that I don’t already know this information, and that there is no comprehensive explanation of what is going on on the ballot (although the LWV come close).

I’d like to share my current reading list:

I’m halfway done with Patrice McDermott’s Who Needs To Know? - The State of Public Access to Federal Information (link).  I wish I had started reading it sooner; it’s packed with public access substance–explanations of laws, the fights that led to their passage, their weaknesses, how they’re abused and how we should try to fix them. 

I’m starting The Hill on the Net: Congress Enters the Information Age (link), by Chris Casey.  I understand that this book is dated in the best possible way–because it was written in the midst of a struggle to get Congress to take advantage of the emergent benefits of the Internet.  Since Chris was personally involved in that fight, I’m looking forward to seeing how his work might shed light on what we’re trying to do now.

Third, I’m reading Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It (link).  Zittrain paints the current state of Internet technology as a dynamic complex balance between two extremes.  On one side is the open, generative net; technology’s wild-west radically egalitarian world where entry barriers are low, and collective action breeds success from unexpected quarters.  On the other side is the authoritarian tendency to regulate, dictate, and control to the point of sterility.  Failure on one side would be a fullscale descent into a flame war over porn by captcha evading spam bots, and failure on the other would be a privatized tyranny run by content providers or by authoritarian governments.  Zittrain gives counsel on how to balance properly between generative social online freedom and the necessary administrative controls and regulations.

Via freegovinfo (via twitter), the New York Times has posted a story about the close relationship between media figures and the current administration.

From an information perspective, I’m impressed (again) by the New York Times development team, who has devised a way for a video news narrative to have original documentation pop up throughout the presentation. The viewer can proceed on a detour through each original document mentioned, perusing the document’s content. The narration can then be restarted.

I often find myself trying to explain the connection between original verifiable sourcing and citizen journalists, whose work is often only validated by the sources it can point to. That’s one reason I embed pdfs so often on this site (here, here); there are a ton of original documents that have a bearing on what we’re working on, and I don’t presume to have all of the answers about what they say.

Now the New York Times isn’t making a move into full on citizen journalism (although that would be quite a story; if, say, they posted the entire results of their FOIA on governmentdocs.org). They are, however, showing a certain respect for the viewer’s position as an information consumer who may want to verify or look for context. We’ll take it, as a start. As James A Jacobs writes:

Together, the audio-visual presentation and the documents are a small model for how newspapers could be using the power of the web to enhance their coverage and utility. I would certainly like to see all 8000 pages online!

Agreed.

From the House Oversight Manual (via fas.org), it looks like listing required reporting is a recommended part of the oversight process, but isn’t necessarily connected to the “oversight plan”, which is required to be published by the House rules (although perhaps not the Senate, haven’t found that yet). The suggestion to include reporting requirements in oversight plans stands… see page 77: