if transparency falls in the forest ...

Originally posted January 25 at revenuewatch.org.

Blogger Elisabeth Rosenthal raises a simple but vital point in this week's NYT "Sunday Review": As governments, watchdogs, the media and regular citizens embrace transparency as an increasingly important value, how do we ensure that information prompts action, and does not become an end in itself?

Using examples including restaurant grading in New York, risk assessment for loans and carbon emission reports, Rosenthal warns that:

... disclosure requirements merely get information onto the table, but themselves demand no further action. According to political theory, disclosure is both a citizen's right and a tool to ensure good government and consumer protection, because it provides information that leads to informed decisions. Instead, disclosure has often become an endpoint in the chain of responsibility, an act of compliance with the letter of the law rather than the spirit of transparency. ...
Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously wrote in 1913 that "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." But in the cynical world, companies and political groups often deflect that light or diffuse it into 1,000 incomprehensible components.

Like the raw materials that become energy, disclosed information often needs refinement and a functioning infrastructure of expertise, analysis and advocacy before it becomes "combustible" fuel for change. Otherwise, as scientist Kevin P. Weinfurt, says in the article, "No one knows exactly what to do with the information once they get it." Archon Fung, head of Harvard's Transparency Policy Project and an RWI colleague, agrees that sometimes disclosure "is ineffective because there's no way to act on it."

Professor Fung and his team work with RWI in the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, which is named in explicit recognition of the dilemma in Rosenthal's article. Without action, transparency may not create accountability, and without accountability, through new laws, new economic policies and sometimes a new government, information is just an endpoint, not a turning point.

Update: A few days after this post, a CNN story made a similar point in the discussion of Mitt Romney's release of his tax returns. If you have a "convoluted tax filing that takes an accounting guru to deconstruct," what have you really disclosed?

we need a Usability Amendment

The public right to information means less when you need a PhD to understand your DMV or your HDL. Reading about the White House push to make credit card agreements simpler, I began to wonder if at this point life as we know it needs a Read Me file.

All of us in Gen X and Y cherish memories of explaining VCRs to our parents, but, in my memory at least, complex things that needed laborious documentation were the exception. We all got computers and figured them out.

Now, between Facebook's privacy settings and the Do Not Call list, it's as if we all need to get engineering degrees to build bulwarks against corporate incursion into our lives.

As "users" of this system we're getting smarter too. Verbs like "delete" and "unsubscribe" and "filter," are no longer for techies and adolescents. Even if only a tiny fraction of Wikipedia users are creating the information, more of us are using Wikipedia and Google as reference sources than ever would have gone to the local library to learn something (or known how to use the library once they got there).

For more about the geek-ification of regular people, see Steven Johnson's great 2005 article about how popular TV is training smarter audiences.

But unless the norms change, the burden will keep shifting onto individuals to opt out of a system that defaults to risk-laden medications, blood-letting bank practices and, of course, carcinogens. As laws become more permissive, tempered only by some rules about citizen warnings, we get closer to a system where rules really are made to be broken.

Not to descend into politics, but how does the small-government crowd reconcile the baseline American libertarianism of property rights with the deregulation that exposes our bodies and bank accounts unless we get Continuing Ed classes in privacy, opt-outs and personal finance?

We may have reached the point where we need a Usability Amendment. One that establishes the right to comprehensibility and operability in the rules and mechanisms that keep our lives and property from overexposure.

The alternative is to hope that all of us are rugged enough to learn the 21st century equivalent of frontier survival, hunting through user agreements, building our own firewalls, and homeschooling ourselves on nutrition and history.

making sense of online data: tidy shelves and good coffee

If you've ever wandered through a small bookshop filled with old books in stacks that seem to have no order or logic, then you understand some of the challenges to using open data on the web.

Imagine if bookshop owners had hundreds of rare and valuable books, but no shelves. Or unlit stores. Imagine if you could not get to the books because the shop door was stuck and the racks were unmarked and the store was only open three hours per day every three days. The process of getting the books to the people isn't finished when you've stocked your store. People need a way in and a way around.

Book collectors may appreciate the adventure of squatting on the floor hunting through dusty piles to find the right book, but the average web user lacks the tools or the training to turn digital piles of data into a small library of the information that matters most.

The growing community of transparency advocates and practitioners is widening its focus from the "What if...?" of greater government openness to the "What now...?" of making data more usable and easier to share. Until recently, financial or regulatory data secured by transparency legislation was probably available only in paper form, in the office of a clerk in the federal capital, hundreds of miles from the communities whose economic survival depends on the money in question.

As legislation becomes more tech-savvy, disclosure requirements have called for public release of data on the web, a big improvement to standard practice, but less useful than one would expect if the figures are released only in PDF files over two megabytes, usable only by citizens with easy computer access and Internet speeds fast enough to download big files.

Even in a best-case scenario where a government agency does release data--not just onto the web but "into the cloud," by publishing information in digital form, displayed directly onto web pages and in a format that computers can read and repackage for new uses--most web pages with government data still look like the cluttered bookstore. They lack a well-organized layout for getting around, there is no annotated catalogue organizing the inventory, and neglect has resulted in broken areas and intermittent access.

An important goal of our bridge-building between transparency advocates and technology groups is to promote better standards for data usability, standards that include not only good organization of websites, but good data formats that enable redistribution, good presentation that does not overwhelm users or distract them with extraneous visual elements, and simple explanations of the information provided.

As we collect and generate the data that fuels advocacy, we should maintain a focus on the elements of effective dissemination and persuasion. Some of these fundamental principles for good data distribution include:

Make it easy to use. Picture the difference between a web page of airfares that you can sort by price or departure time and a Microsoft Excel file of airfares that you can could use one hundred different ways, if only you knew how. The presentation and structure of your information becomes the story that your information tells.

Sometimes "usability" means layout, sometimes it means aesthetics, sometimes it means which tools you use. Try to have an interface that is "persuasive" and not "dissuasive" in how it ushers people through the information. (Credit to the team at @demo_cratica for the term "dissuasive interface.")

To dig deeper, read about Edward Tufte, FlowingData and the problems with infographics, and see this smart guide from John Emerson and Open Society Foundations.

Make it easy to copy and re-use. Too often advocacy groups that succeed in extracting transparency data do not follow through and repackage the data into simple spreadsheets for download, distinct data sets each with their own web URLs, or "widgets" that allow other groups to use the data in other ways. If open government means too little without mechanisms of accountability, then open data falls short without follow-through that enables easy sharing.

To dig deeper, read suggested principles for government transparency from former US CIO Vivek Kundra and the Open Knowledge Foundation. Also see a sample manifesto for open data shared by Andrew Rasiej, and one simple tool for promoting distribution, Facebook's Like button.

Give people context; words matter. It's common sense, but the simple step of explaining the data to non-experts is often neglected in data dissemination. This effectively shuts out not only users from affected communities, but many leaders and advocates with the power to help create change if the story behind the data was made clear to them.

As data proliferates across the Internet, the role of the "data journalist" is increasingly recognized as vital to advocacy, and tools like DocumentCloud have emerged as "infomediary" mechanisms to make big data sets and obscure policy information more comprehensible. Before the New York Times published the WikiLeaks cables, for instance, journalists spent days poring over their contents in order to create the scaffold of rudimentary summaries attached to each cable posted on NYTimes.com.

To dig deeper, also check out some tips on the fundamentals of writing for web sites and emails from the Guardian, O'Reilly Radar, UX Magazine, Free Range Studios, M+R Research Labs and Madeline Stanionis.

Start with what's relevant. There's a reason why 89% of people seeking local information in the U.S. want weather information (more than look for breaking news, politics, traffic, restaurants). People are motivated by what is most relevant to their lives. That's why Ushahidi (or Craigslist) is so frequently used, and why so many online tools ask for your postal code or Zip code.

For inspiration on making data personal and local, check out FixMyStreet, WhereDoesMyMoneyGo, IfItWereMyHome and Recovery.gov.

In the end, data doesn't teach people; people teach people. Amid our continuing struggle to wrest data from secretive or under-resourced governments and get it online somewhere, the open data community can lose track of the importance of "accessibility" in the more figurative sense.

These less technical demands of data management--web design and architecture, methods for republishing and sharing, citizen-friendly explanations and narratives that create relevance--are what turn our open data bookstore from a dimly-lit firetrap that smells like cat litter into a neighborhood institution with coffee, comfortable chairs, and friendly clerks. The kind of place you want to visit again, and where you might someday bring your own books to share with the community.

Without proper presentation and "hospitality," it is much harder to turn data into information, and opportunities are lost.

Originally posted at Bridging Technology and Transparency. Photo: MorBCN/Flickr

new tool for change in Philly

Seeing this new site asking for citizen ideas for Philly would be interesting enough any time, but was especially moving because I know Rob Stuart would have said something about it if he were still alive.

Rob died suddenly last month, at 49 years old. He was a long time advocate for Philly citizens, anti-corporatism, democracy and participation at the local level.

I can only imagine how much he'd have dug this site, with its simplicity and built in network-centric design. Look at the way the Post-It motif instantly makes any one contributor see that she or he is part of a larger community of participants. It also uses the visual vernacular of Post-Its to create a sense of brevity and informality, which lowers the barriers to participation way, way down.

Of course, the proof will be in how much use it gets, which often depends more on if there are hot issues that already have people personally involved, or that have high visibility in the news.

I wrote a remembrance of Rob on TechPresident.com with Allison Fine that says a lot more about his influence on web advocacy. And if you knew him and want to get involved in some of the things he cared about, his friends have set up a great site about him.

votes in Ohio, Mississippi a reminder about democracy

NYT post-Election Day editorial makes me feel good about the moderation that is hard-wired into the democratic system:

These policies, and similar ones in other states, were passed in an arrogant frenzy by a Tea Party-tide of Republicans elected in 2010. Many of them decided that they had a mandate to dismantle some of the basic protections and restrictions of government. They went too far, and weary voters had to drag them back toward the center.

We may still be a hamster in the coils of a hungry corporate oligarchy, but moments like this are good ones.

NYT letter: passion makes new tools powerful

A letter I wrote earlier this year in The New York Times:

The Power of Technology
To the Editor:

Re "Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land" ("Humanities 2.0" series, Arts pages, July 26):

What is most compelling about your article on the emerging field of "spatial humanities" is how it inverts the faddish misconception that technology makes information more interesting.

The article's examples demonstrate that cutting-edge maps are only as valuable as the stories they illustrate. Technology may help make the Gettysburg battlefield and the Salem witch trials more "vivid and personal," but the tools would be irrelevant if our sense of suffering and injustice had not made these events cultural touchstones.

When activists organize over Twitter, or donors rush online to help candidates or refugees, or citizens use cellphones and maps to report government corruption, they are driven primarily by the urgency of a cause or crisis. Amid the (sometimes) worthwhile debate over whether the Internet can change the world, we should remember that it is personal and political passion that give these tools their power.

JED MILLER
New York, July 26, 2011

The writer is Internet director for an oil, gas and mining policy institute.

looking back

I am thinking about the September 11 attacks and reminded of my awe at all the people who helped and rushed downtown and gave so much, including their lives. For those who are still here, the toll is hard in its own way. Mary, who was a first responder that week, was wondering today if the people shaken by those days ever worry that the scars from that time keep them from giving their best in the present.

My own worry is that all of us, and the country, and our culture, have internalized and accepted a culture of anxiety and "victim's exceptionalism" that justifies small moments of selfishness and awful acts of political and geopolitical meanness.

Not to mention the tragedy porn that we've all been subjected to. Look at the homepage of USA Today right now. I have the deepest respect for the people who lost loved ones that day, the fallen victims and responders, and the soldiers and civilians of dozens of nations who have died or suffered in the years since as a direct result of that day and the actions that followed. But can anyone else wring their hands and forget others' pain the way Americans can?

A project I worked on post-9/11 gave me the opportunity to meet Paul Rieckhoff, founder of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association. His work is a response to war and tragedy that I can believe in. Check out the honest, funny, wide-hearted writing of Abby Carter, who lost her husband and the father of her two kids that day. Consider the impact of our response to the attacks, on America's reputation, our civil liberties, and our approach to government.

Here's what I wrote that week. We said "Stay safe" to each other a lot then and in the weeks after. (I still say "Safe travels" to friends and colleagues who are flying, which I never did before that day.) But ten years on, remember all the things we need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from, besides planes used as missiles or lawless fundamentalists--remember that grief heated to rage and pain rotted to retreat are also weapons of terror. Watch your own heart, not just the skies. Consider turning away from the glare of after-images. Stay safe.