What transparency can do

 There is a growing demand in America for government transparency, and Obama is promising to come through.  But transparency is useless if nobody is watching.  Data, by itself, is usually not very interesting until someone turns it into information.  

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants…” (Louis Brandeis, What Publicity Can Do, Harper’s Weekly, 1913)   

 Sunlight Foundation Intern Andrew Berger looked to the career and early writings and public speeches of Louis Brandeis to understand how Brandeis idea of publicity and sunlight relates to the current government transparency movement and citizen engagement.

“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…”     

 When people get a taste of good open information from the government, they’re not going to be easily satisfied with whitewashed rhetoric and idealistic speeches.  Get ready, folks: with transparency comes accountability… and a bigger appetite for information.

This entry was posted on May 26, 2009 at 22:24 and is filed under public policy, social ventures, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.