The Changing Realm of Open Government

The following is a session I designed for City Hall Fellows 2011-2012 San Francisco Class about Open Government.  I think others may find these resources helpful, so I have posted it here.

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Session Overview

In this session we will be exploring what open government means and how the meaning has changed. If you read below you’ll get a brief history of open government as it pertains to increasing government transparency and accountability. During the CLDP session, we’ll look at how the City and County of San Francisco is increasing transparency, how external groups are augmenting what is provided, and what is in store for the future.

Session Outline

  • 1:00-2:00pm : City Initiatives to Increase Transparency
    • Jack Chin, Department of Technology
    • Umesh Gupta, Department of Technology
  • 2:30-3:30pm : Using Public Data for the Public
    • Jake Levitas, Grey Area Foundation for the Arts
    • Jack Madans, Code for America
  • 4:00-5:00pm : The Future of Open Government in San Francisco
    • Shannon Spanhake, OpenGov initiative in SF (Dept. Tech)

Recommended Preparation

  1. Review Speaker Bios, Key Questions, and Background Information.
  2. Review the Legal Documents/Timeline section (no need to read all of them, but take a look at the different acts over the years). Do read President Obama’s Open Gov memo and Mayor Newsom’s Open Data Directive if you have time.
  3. Read the San Francisco Plan article from Tech President and Gov 2.0 article from GovFresh.
  4. Peruse the dataSF data sets and app showcase.
  5. Take a look at the other examples that cities and news agencies are doing.
    1. What are ways that we (as a city or individuals) could undertake similar efforts?
    2. What are other cities/agencies doing that SF is not?

Speaker Biographies

Jack Chin is the General Manager of SFGovTV in the Department of Technology. SFGovTV and SFGovTV2, San Francisco’s Cable Channels 26 and 78, provide the City and County of San Francisco access to quality government programming. SFGovTV and SFGovTV2 cablecast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Jake Levitas is a designer, consultant, and community activist based in San Francisco. His work is focused at the intersections of sustainability, community, geography, journalism, art, and technology. He has led and worked on a number of creative technology projects, and currently serves as Project Director of TenderVoice, an interactive audio map of community resources in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. His multidisciplinary background includes several years of experience in urban planning, mapping, information design, and sustainability consulting, as well as work in graphic design, audio production, and architecture. He holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies and Economics from Washington University in St. Louis, and has taken postgraduate classes in Geographic Information Systems and Science from Kingston University London.

Jack Madans (Program Coordinator) cut his teeth as a community organizer early on when he founded the pilot project, FoodCycle, while studying at the London School of Economics. Under Jack’s leadership FoodCycle served 200 three-course meals a week at the cost of 50 cents per meal, and has grown to now serving 3,000 meals. While interning at the White House, Jack assisted with policy production in the the Office of Urban Affairs and outreach to the nation’s Mayors in the office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Jack founded the Digital Citizens Project, a group of techno-progressives that build tools, share concepts, and aggregate individuals to collectively use technology in the public interest. Jack earned a degree in Political Science from UC Berkeley where he was President of the Roosevelt Institute’s local chapter

Shannon Spanhake recently joined the City and County of San Francisco to focus on building an OpenGov program within the Dept. of Technology. She aims to strengthen and enable partnerships between public, private, and people sectors to identify and solve civic challenges. Previously, she held a dual appointment as a Sr. Researcher at the Center for Development Finance and also a Post-doc at the California Institute for Telecom and IT. She has a patent-pending for a citizen-powered wireless sensor networking technology and she has co-founded cultural spaces in Mexico and India that explore the community and urban dynamics.

Key Questions

Some questions to think about as we go through this session:

  • Why do we value government transparency?
  • What are the conflicts in trying to make all data public? (national security and privacy concerns)
  • What type of information is released and is not released? Why?
  • What is the ideal vision for government transparency/open government?
  • How has the practical application of open government changed over time and how will it continue to change going forward?
  • What role do you, as interested and engaged individuals, see for yourselves in increasing government transparency and accountability?

Background Information

(From the Sunlight Foundation Blog, by Andrew Berger. I think this provides a good overview of some of the key concerns in open government.)

From Brandeis’ Boston to today

Brandeis graduated from Harvard Law School in 1878 and for the first decade or so of his legal career, he does not seem to have been very heavily involved in public affairs. But in the 1890s, he began to take on cases that brought him into closer contact with the political system. One important case dealt with the reform of the Massachusetts state liquor laws, which followed the revelation that the liquor lobby was bribing state legislators. In another case, he represented a group of merchants–some of whom were already his clients from other contexts–who opposed an attempt by the Boston subway company to gain a monopoly over the city’s mass transportation system, which at the time was not entirely in public hands. He was largely successful in both cases (Strum, 17-19).

In addition to his legal work, Brandeis gave speeches on politics before business, reform, and good government groups. His April 1903 address before Boston’s Unitarian Club made several of the local papers. The Boston Heraldconsidered the event important enough for a front page headline: “USE SEARCHLIGHT ON THE CITY HALL: Brandeis Says It Is High Time to Delve Into Corruption in City Affairs.” The article included a transcript of Brandeis’ remarks.

Here, in the course of highlighting a number of questionable expenditures the city had made in recent years, Brandeis hit on some key topics that remain at the forefront of transparency efforts today: the importance of collecting and disseminating government data, the need for open meetings, and the role of nongovernmental groups in making government more transparent.

Taking them in order, and with an eye to modern-day parallels:

  • Data collection and dissemination

Many suspected that some significant number of city employees had patronage jobs that required little work. To expose these cases, Brandeis and other reformers supported the publication of the city payroll. Brandeis also praised the new mayoral administration for issuing public reports about the city’s spending under previous administrations. But because the city’s bookkeeping records were such a mess, the value of the reports was limited: it was very difficult to compare Boston’s spending with that of other cities, or even with its own spending in earlier years. To Brandeis, this illustrated the importance of getting cities to adopt uniform accounting rules.

Today, transparency has moved beyond a focus on accounting standards and printed reports, which have become largely routine, but the principles remain quite similar. Only now the push is for online access to data and uniform data standards. Many states and other public entities have begun putting spending information online in recent years, but they have not always used the same reporting standards. These efforts are encouraging, but the adoption of agreed upon standards would make it possible to run a wider range of analyses on the data, especially across different states.

  • Open and closed meetings

While the board of aldermen did meet in public session, it was only to receive business. Then the aldermen would carry out their discussions and vote as the “committee on public improvements”–which was essentially the same group of men, only meeting in closed session. This “desire for secrecy,” said Brandeis, was “not surprising” when you considered the “quality of the some of the acts” approved by the board.

Things have improved considerably in this area since Brandeis’ day. Many states have open meeting laws that require justifications to be given for closed meetings. Transparency efforts now focus more on getting the content of those meetings – agendas, minutes, even live or archived audio or video – online.

  • The role of nongovernmental groups

Finally, Brandeis declared that government action, no matter how dedicated, would never be enough to keep the public sufficiently informed: “the individual citizen must in some way collect and spread the information.” This meant not so much individuals acting alone, but nongovernmental organizations such as civic groups who provided information to voters or, even more importantly, the press. Speaking at a time when the only way to reach large audiences on a regular basis was through print, Brandeis saw the press as potentially “the greatest agency of good government”–but only “if the people are sufficiently interested to desire it.”

This raises an important question: how do the people become “sufficiently interested”? Brandeis seems to have believed in a symbiotic relationship between an informed and an engaged citizenry. The people had not yet joined the fight against corruption because they did not yet know enough about the situation. They were “ignorant of the facts–ignorant of the specific acts of misgovernment–ignorant of the low character or quality of many of the men by whom in public life they are misrepresented.”

No one, he said, could “look into the details of our city’s administration and be indifferent.” Such information would naturally lead to indignation, and out of that indignation would come a movement for “remedial action.” Publicity would overcome apathy.

The printed press, even in its current troubled state, continues to play an important role in generating interest in government and misgovernment, but now it has been joined by outside groups producing their own research and analyses. While such groups have existed for decades, the Internet has made it possible for them to reach large audiences directly – and if this audience includes reporters, and those reporters then reach even more people, so much the better.

The Web has also made possible types of information sharing and citizen engagement that did not exist even a few years ago, much less in Brandeis’ time. It has become easier for a person to turn from passive reader to active participant in politics. But it remains just as true today that a person has to become “sufficiently interested” in order to do so. To an extent, techniques like data visualizations, which really seem to have taken off in recent years, are important not just for the specific content they present, but for their potential to drive interest in government information. They are additional strategies–to go along with more traditional forms of research and reporting and advocacy–for using transparency to overcome apathy.

External Links and Readings

News Articles

Legal Documents/Timeline

How SF is opening government

  • DataSF – DataSF is a clearinghouse of datasets available from the City & County of San Francisco.
  • Data SF App Showcase
    • Crimespotting – San Francisco Crimespotting is an interactive map of crimes in San Francisco and a tool for understanding crime in cities.
    • Everyblock – EveryBlock publishes a news feed for every city block in San Francisco
    • HowSFVotes – HowSFVotes is a tool for exploring historical election results in San Francisco precinct-by-precinct. Use it to compare and analyze results from federal, state and local races from 2004 to the present as well as the 2000 census
    • SeeClickFix – SeeClickFix is an iPhone, Android and Blackberry app that lets you report non-emergency issues to SF311 and others.
    • SFPark – SFpark.org helps drivers park smarter in San Francisco. See real-time availability and prices for parking spaces on streets and in City garages across eight SFpark pilot areas
  • SFGovTV – provides livestreams and hosts archives of all board meetings and commission meetings

How other cities/states are opening government

  • City of Chicago Data Portal – The site hosts over 200 datasets presented in easy-to-use formats about City departments, services, facilities and performance.
  • New Urban Mechanics – Boston
    • My Dot Tour – Offers a new way for residents to learn about and share opinions on the past, present and future of a neighborhood.
    • Street Bump – Taking advantage of the sensors on smart phones, Street Bump will provide the City with a near-real time picture of Boston’s road conditions and the location of its potholes.
    • Where’s my school bus – This app allows parents to sign up to see on a computer or smart phone the real-time location of their child’s school bus.
  • NYC Open Data – This catalog supplies hundreds of sets of public data produced by City agencies and other City organizations.
  • New York City Media Lab – NYC Media Lab connects companies seeking to advance new media technologies with academic institutions undertaking relevant research, in order to drive collaborative innovation.
  • OpenBaltimore – The goal of OpenBaltimore is to provide, to the public, access to City data in an effort that supports government transparency, openness and innovative uses that will help improve the lives of Baltimore residents, visitors and businesses through use of technology.
  • Open Book New York – New Yorkers should know where their tax dollars are going. Open Book New York is part of State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli’s effort to promote more openness in government and give taxpayers better access to the financial workings of government.
  • OpenDataPhilly - a portal that provides access to over 100 data sets, applications, and APIs related to the Philadelphia region.
  • Talk Vancouver – At The City of Vancouver we’re keen to hear from residents and businesses on a variety of issues. One of the ways we’re engaging the public is through this web portal.

How the Federal Government is opening government

  • White House Open Government Initiative – portal to open government work
  • White House Petitions – tool used to create petitions to be reviewed by White House staff. If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response.
  • Tax Receipt – Just enter a few pieces of information about your taxes, and the taxpayer receipt will give you a breakdown of how your tax dollars are spent on priorities like education, veterans benefits, or health care.
  • Data.gov – datasets from the federal government
  • USASpending.gov – tracks federal government spending

Groups working on Open Government issues

  • Code for America – Code for America helps governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web.
  • Common Cause – Since Common Cause first started “looking over shoulders” in 1970, Common Cause and its activists have been at the forefront of ensuring that government officials are acting in the public interest, not for their own personal benefit or for the benefit of powerful and influential special interest.
  • Electronic Frontiers Foundation – EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations.
  • GovFresh – works to inspire government-citizen collaboration and build a more engaged democracy. We feature public servant innovators, civic entrepreneurs and the ideas and technology that are changing how government works.
  • SunshineReview – wiki with information about open government policies

Groups funding Open Government initiatives

Other Examples

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