The Truth is Out There
December 10, 2009 by Rachel Baker · Leave a Comment
Over the past few weeks, we have posted a great deal of information about websites that offer governmental reports, datasets and analysis. We haven’t added much commentary to many of these articles, because we just wanted to show our readers where to find them.
Transparency in government is a good thing. For too long, the American people have had no idea how policy actually affected us and we couldn’t see the paper trail that showed us what was working and what wasn’t. All we saw was whether or not it affected our individual selves, and not how the policy affected the country as a whole. We’ve had to rely on what the news outlets told us was happening without having the ability to see it for ourselves. We weren’t given the ability to make our comments heard unless we called a congressman/woman’s and voiced a complaint to a staffer. Now, we can pull government reports in several different file formats, comment on bills being passed by Congress, and even see who is visiting the whitehouse and when they visited.
But why are we devoting all this time to where to find this information?
Its easy – for the first time in most of our lives, we can have true political debates with hard data and real facts to back up our arguments. For the first time in our lives, we can actually see how our taxpayer money is being spent. And for the first time in our lives, we can leave comments line by line on legislation being debated in Congress. More than that, though, we can be informed and have intellectual debates amongst ourselves that help us to understand the issues and all sides of an issue, if we choose to.
President Obama, in January 2009, made transparency and openness in government a high priority. While there may be criticism that there are more important things he should be focused on, I feel like this is a long-needed change in the way our government operates. How can we really know what is going on in our government if we are limited to the nightly news or what read in our newspapers?
We should be able to look at how the recovery money is being spent nationwide, as well as statewide, and how it contributes to our current and future individual economic state; and we should be able to figure out on our own how the Green Technology Initiatives will affect future job growth and our economy; or how locally, different Initiatives will affect how our local politicians choose to award contracts to new businesses. We should be able to balance information from various reports and datasets to understand how one area of government is affected by another. We should be able to think for ourselves and not rely on a news network to tell us how to think.
The Progress Report on Open Government to the American People is a report on exactly how the government is achieving the goals of the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, issued on January 21, 2009. Its not that many pages and I recommend taking a gander at it.
Yesterday, a White House Directive was released requiring all agencies in the federal government to adopt aggressive open government policies to further promote the principles of transparency, participation and collaboration. This Directive “is intended to direct executive departments and agencies to take specific actions to implement the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration set forth in the President’s Memorandum.” In response to this Directive, every Cabinet Department has committed to launching a new open government project.
To view these Cabinet commitments, go here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/commitments
The aim of these projects are to improve collaboration between government, private industry and the public to improve the lives of Americans in their communities. For the first time in our lives, we are being empowered to be more informed and even have some input in how the future of America is shaped.
Is it possible that we are being bombarded by too much information by having all this information at our fingertips? Yes, of course it is. Sometimes, its difficult to know what’s real and what isn’t because we already have so much information at our fingertips with the Internet. That said, most of us are learning how to siphon information and figure out what’s most pertinent and what is more factual.
It is also possible (and dare I say, probable) that some really great innovation will come out of the general public having access to some of this information and data. I am willing to pour over the many reports now available to me and cross reference these reports with datasets from other areas of our government to try to understand the legislative decisions being made and how they will affect my life and the life of my fellow Americans. As someone who lives within five miles of a Nuclear Power Plant, I am willing to celebrate with the workers in a Virginia Nuclear Power Plant because they were able to cut 70% of their response time in making evacuation decisions during an exercise by utilizing the information provided on Virtual USA (a Department of Homeland Security project); and I am willing to make the correlation that if all major emergency response communities have access to this information, there could be a cut in spending in these areas because they will be able to streamline their processes, which ultimately could provide more spending in areas that directly affect the lives of all Americans.
