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Put more government data online

Jerry Brito

January 8, 2008

Des Moines Register

Last year, bloggers uncovered that Sen. Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens was behind a secret hold on a bill introduced by Sens. Tom Coburn and Barack Obama to create a searchable online database of federal spending. This discovery embarrassed the not easily embarrassed Stevens enough that he withdrew the hold, and the database bill soon passed both houses.

After a year in the making, the federal-spending database went live last month at http://www.usaspending.gov/.

The Web site gives citizens, journalists, scholars and bloggers an easy way to track federal funds. By shining light on the activities of government, the database makes it easier to identify waste and inefficiency and to hold accountable those responsible. But, while the new Web site is a victory for online transparency, the federal government still has a long way to go.

For example, if you want to look up your senator's voting record, where would you go? Not to Congress's Web sites. While both the House and Senate Web sites offer daily listings of roll-call votes, it would take days for a citizen to piece together a member of Congress' voting record from that information. Each bill has its own Web page, listing the last names of the "yeas" and then the "nays." To decipher a voting record, one would have to load hundreds of pages, pausing at each one to note whether the legislator in question fell into the yea or nay camp.

Congress is not the only branch of government that makes information hard to find. A good deal of government information is supposed to be publicly available in the name of transparency and accountability, including financial disclosure forms and regulatory dockets. Unfortunately, government information is often only nominally available, such as in a government reading room in Washington.

Moreover, when government information is available online, it is often difficult to find and use - like the congressional votes.

A number of independent computer programmers have reacted to this failure of government by creating online tools to fill the transparency gap. University of Pennsylvania linguistics student Joshua Tauberer created GovTrack.us to allow citizens to track Congress' activities. At that site, you'll find a page for each member of Congress that lists his or her votes on every bill since 1993, sponsored bills and other details, including biographical information, campaign-finance data and links to videos of floor speeches. You also can subscribe to a feed for a particular legislator or bill and for an instant alert when new information becomes available.

This sort of flexibility is possible because GovTrack.us turns the unsorted data from Congress' Web site into a structured format, such as XML. Individual users can then track legislation and legislators by subscribing to data feeds. Others can also use these feeds in their own Web applications. For example, MAPLight.org mashes together congressional voting data from GovTrack.us and campaign-finance information from OpenSecrets.org to produce a searchable database that highlights the connections between campaign contributions and how members of Congress vote.

These tools empower citizens to make up their own minds on important issues using first-hand information. Perhaps more important, they also allow for "crowdsourcing" of government transparency. That is, they make it easy for millions of bloggers and other Internet users, not to mention journalists, to keep tabs on the activities of government.

Of course, this sort of scrutiny requires that public information be online. Government is making some progress on this front. For example, lobbyists for foreign interests are required to register with the Department of Justice and fill out a disclosure form. The department has always made these disclosure forms available for public inspection, but only at its headquarters on business days between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Since June, however, the department has been slowly making a searchable database of these documents available online.

We should demand that government make more information available online and present the data in flexible, structured formats to facilitate independent and innovative use of the data. To the extent that government does not modernize, however, we should hope that private parties continue to build unofficial databases and make these available to the public.