OpenCongress.org: Radical Transparency Whether Congress Wants It Or Not

I've been dying to blog about this site since I saw the beta call back in November. Opencongress.org aims to add much-needed transparency and usable search tools to open the often closed, and intentionally obscure workings of the United States Congress.

It is the first project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, founded by the same people who have launched the Participatory Culture Foundation and it's awesome Democracy Internet TV player. Co-creator David Moore says:

One of the problems we were aiming to address is that there is a lack of comprehensive, usable web resources for people and groups writing about bills and issues in Congress. The Library of Congress website, Thomas, doesn't do nearly enough to make Congressional information accessible -- meaning that political bloggers didn't have anywhere helpful to link when discussing Congress, that there wasn't a way for their readers to get the "big picture" behind an issue. The lack of public knowledge about what's really happening in Congress breeds apathy about political change in general.

OpenCongress helps close the information gap between political insiders and the public by bringing together official government information from Thomas (by way of GovTrack.us), news articles from Google News, blog posts from Technorati, campaign contribution data from OpenSecrets.org, and more -- to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.

I've been on the beta user list and have been noodling around with it since November (December?), and I can tell you it is easy to use to find out what bills are going where. One can quite readily drill down to the excruciating details of bill language; the truly important stuff heretofore knowable and accessible in real-time only by staffers and industry lobbyists who help craft the actual bills.

One of the cooler features are the RSS feeds for the main site blog and for the interest areas that allow headlines to be streamed out to your web browser for quick access to breaking news and events.

Truly, this is a tool that has the potential to realize a lot of the promise that technology trend wonks like me keep spouting about networks and participatory culture. I suggest everyone at least give it a look and bookmark it for future reference.

Radical Transparency in Journalism

Over at Wired they are starting to practice what they preach in the radical transparency experiment preached by Chris Anderson. Clive Thompson posts his thoughts and asks for comments prior to beginning work on a story on... "Radical Transparency." He is looking for examples of:

The curiously quotidian, everyday ways that life is being tweaked -- and improved -- by people voluntarily becoming more open. That includes: Clubhoppers hooking up with each other by listing their locations in real-time on Dodgeball; mining company CEOs making billions (billions!) by posting their geologic data online and getting strangers to help them find gold; Dan Rather's audience fact-checking his work and discovering that crucial parts of his reporting evidence are faked; sci-fi author Cory Doctorow selling more of his print books by giving e-copies away for free...

Specifically, he says he is working on the following general guiding principles of radical transparency.

Secrecy Is Dead: The pre-Internet world trafficked in secrets. Information was valuable because it was rare; keeping it secret increased its value. In the modern world, information is as plentiful as dirt, there's more of it than you can possibly grok on your own -- and the profusion of cameraphones, forwarded emails, search engines, anonymous tipsters, and infinitely copyable digital documents means that your attempts to keep secrets will probably, eventually, fail anyway. Don't bother trying. You'll just look like a jackass when your secrets are leaked and your lies are exposed, kind of like Sony and its rootkit. Instead ...

Tap The Hivemind: Throw everything you've got online, and invite the world to look at it. They'll have more and better ideas that you could have on your own, more and better information than you could gather on your own, wiser and sager perspective than you could gather in 1,000 years of living -- and they'll share it with you. You'll blow past the secret-keepers as if you were driving a car that exists in a world with different and superior physics. Like we said, information used to be rare ... but now it's so ridiculously plentiful that you will never make sense of it on your own. You need help, and you need to help others. And, by the way? Keep in mind that ...

Reputation Is Everything: Google isn't a search engine. Google is a reputation-managment system. What do we search for, anyway? Mostly people, products, ideas -- and what we want to know are, what do other people think about this stuff? All this blogging, Flickring, MySpacing, journaling -- and, most of all, linking -- has transformed the Internet into a world where it's incredibly easy to figure out what the world thinks about you, your neighbor, the company you work for, or the stuff you were blabbing about four years ago. It might seem paradoxical, but in a situation like that, it's better to be an active participant in the ongoing conversation than to stand off and refuse to participate. Because, okay, let's say you don't want to blog, or to Flickr, or to participate in online discussion threads. That means the next time someone Googles you they'll find ... everything that everyone else has said about you, rather than the stuff you've said yourself. (Again -- just ask Sony about this one.) The only way to improve and buff your reputation is to dive in and participate. Be open. Be generous. Throw stuff out there -- your thoughts, your ideas, your personality. Trust comes from transparency.

The Future Of News In Clinton?

Both on the blog and in my professional life I talk a lot about how technology doesn't just allow us to make huge transformations in our economic and social circumstances, technology demands those changes. The modalities of these changes center around a few central theories and movements:

• The wisdom of crowds


• Radical transparency


• Open source culture

Each of these ideas on their own are subjects worthy of books and journal articles. And they exist. Next to each is a link providing a Wikipedia entry as a place to begin. I'll continue to write and speak on them. But I think it is time for action.

One of the hallmarks of 21st Century Technoculture should be strong, participatory communities not only at the global and/or special-interest level, e.g. MySpace and say, model railroaders, but at the local level as well. After all, what good does it do one to have rich, interactive, global, technologically-mediated experiences and relationships if one’s meatspace existence -- the place of living and breathing -- are devoid of any cohesion, organization or community spirit? Better to bring to bear the tools of the global macro- technoculture to bear on the needs of the microculture of Clinton, Iowa.

Now, Clinton has at least two or three pretty active discussion forums. One is hosted by The Clinton Herald and the other by a private person at www.clintoniowa.com. These forums allow for all sorts of discussion on local topics and sometimes even expand on and add to news stores and allow people to build on shared experience. But one of the drawbacks of bulletin boards is that they often descend into bickering and name-calling.

The bulletin boards could be home to original reporting but by their very technological structure they lack cooperative editing tools and a friendly display format for articles.

The local newspaper, The Clinton Herald, as are all newspapers today, a holdout of a previous technoculture. The idea of a news organization that painstakingly crafts its stories once per day and then manufactures and distributes them on dead trees, frozen in that printed form until the paper molders is totally inappropriate on many levels for the 21st Century.

News is slippery stuff. The idea of a news story, frozen for all time on ink on paper is a product of the 18th Century manufacturing processes that brought us the newspaper in the first place. News stories insist by their very nature that they be annotated, corrected, added on to, and collaboratively assembled.

So, in the spirit of brining 21st Century technoculture to bear on the needs of Clinton, Iowa I propose the following little experiment, an open-source news portal for Clinton powered by Wikinews. Behold the Clinton Wikinews Portal!



Okay, it’s not much. But that’s where you come in. For everyone who has ever bitched about the local news coverage in insert name of media organization here, now is your chance. Know the whole sordid back-story of whatever is going on at the Humane Society? Want more meat on City Council goings on? Need an excuse to go to all Clinton High School basketball games?

Then go forth and report. Gather some facts. Facts, for certain of my bulletin board friends, are provable assertions backed up by more than one source and documentable. See the Wikinews article on Writing An Article. Talk to some people, write a story, check your spelling and grammar and post it.

Only have a few facts to contribute? Post a story in development and let other people put meat on the bones of your story. Find a factual error in a story, correct it yourself.

All of this and more is possible through the technology of the Wiki, the software platform running behind Wikipedia. It is a signature of our early 21st Century technoculture; open-source, transparent, shapeable by the masses.

This is an experiment. Is there enough interest and ability for people to report and analyze the goings on in a town of 27,000? Can it be done in such a way to provide additional information and quality that is not available from the local newspaper? Theoretically, because of space and financial constraints the Clinton Herald will never be able to have the breadth and depth of an active user-generated news site. But the question is, can people be motivated to create their own local news in a town the size of Clinton?

That’s what I aim to find out. I think this project is the perfect vehicle for journalism students and teachers at all levels. No longer chained to budgets for ink and paper, budding young muckrakers are free to go forth to write and report and practice their craft. In the coming weeks, I’ll be reaching out to those of you in the business of teaching writing and journalism. If anyone is going to fully embrace this tool from the get-go it will need to be young aspiring writers.

Later in the week, I will post some links on tips for getting started with Wiki news. It is pretty straightforward and there is a minimum of coding needed in order to post stories. Many of the functions can be accomplished with the press of a button in the editing window.

In the meantime, anyone who is interested in contributing and helping with this project should feel free to contact me at cman@cman.cx

Until then, I’ll close this last post of 2006 with Hunter S. Thompson’s famous tag line: Res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself.

Happy New Year.

Insurgents Using New Ideas Choke Iraq, No New Ideas Here Though

James Glanz writes in today's New York Times that Iraq Insurgents Starve Capital of Electricity:

Over the past six months, Baghdad has been all but isolated electrically, Iraqi officials say, as insurgents have effectively won their battle to bring down critical high-voltage lines and cut off the capital from the major power plants to the north, south and west.

The battle has been waged in the remotest parts of the open desert, where the great towers that support thousands of miles of exposed lines are frequently felled with explosive charges in increasingly determined and sophisticated attacks, generally at night. Crews that arrive to repair the damage are often attacked and sometimes killed, ensuring that the government falls further and further behind as it attempts to repair the lines.

Mr. Wahid said that last week, seven of the nine lines supplying power directly to Baghdad were down, and that just a trickle of electricity was flowing through the two others. Western officials agreed that most of the lines were down, but gave somewhat higher estimates on the electricity that was still flowing.

And in a measure of the deep disunity and dysfunction of this nation, when the repair crews and security forces are slow to respond, skilled looters often arrive with heavy trucks that pull down more of the towers to steal as much of the valuable aluminum conducting material in the lines as possible. The aluminum is melted into ingots and sold.

While Mr. Glanz goes on to give a solid, workmanlike recitation of the facts and figures of the country's electrical infrastructure and problems with same, he really misses the point that what he's describing is textbook 4th Generation War: as it starves the Malaki government of credibility and bleeds the population's will to resist... whatever it is the bad guys want. I'm still unclear on that part, but I'm sure the people dynamiting the electrical grid have a diamond-sharp agenda.

So, as the bad guys continue to innovate the nation of Iraq out of existence the powers that be in D.C. as well as the wannabes continue to trot out ideas that are either too little, too late (more troops) or just plain blame the victim rationalizations to get the hell out (Visack, Levin, et. al.). None of which are going to help us gain control or regain the initiative in Iraq.

Sure, it is easy to throw stones. Do I have any answers to Iraq? No. I've thought about it a lot and I really don't see any possible "victory" scenario. Just varying shades of failure, shame and regional unrest.

But the one ray of hope that do have is that the tools needed to, a) prevent another Iraq debacle from happening or, b) help inoculate the United States against internal 4th Generation Warfare tactics are becoming apparent.

Radical Transparency is one path. Pulling the curtain back from the wizards at the controls and allowing the wisdom of crowds to identify and close weaknesses. As John Robb puts it:

A newly vigilant and networked public will push for much greater levels of transparency in government and corporate operations, using the Internet to expose, publish, and patch potential security flaws. Over time, this new transparency, and the wider participation it entails, will lead to radical improvements in government and corporate efficiency.

Certainly the current tactics of Chomsky-esque manufacturing of consent and outright propaganda are reaching the point of diminishing returns, just as an over-stimulated public is also rejecting the ever more omnipresent advertising industry. As Robb continues:

Within the context of 21st century warfare, moral cohesion and innovation (particularly given open source opponents) have emerged as paramount concerns. Up until now, nation-states have relied on propaganda to mobilize the public for war and maintain the effort. In parallel, black box decision making has been relied upon to produce ongoing improvements in capabilities/technology. However, in this long war, these methods are more of a liability than an asset. Propaganda has proven to be both ineffective and harmful (see my critique: "Propaganda Wars" for more on this) -- and -- black box decision making has yet to yield any meaningful improvements in capabilities. In my view, an update to our decision making process (to take advantage of vastly superior information flows) through radical transparency would be a far superior means of maintaining our moral cohesion and innovation over the long haul.

Many of the tools required are in our hands. What is needed is some event or catalyst that can force open the black boxes of power and capital and bring a more transparent society. Secrecy (and privacy) may be dead, but that doesn't neccesarily have to be a bad thing.

Visualizing Your Tax Dollars

The website The Budgetgraph houses a huge representation of where your federal taxes are spent. ot only does it show the amount spent on each item, but it also shows the percentage change from last year so you can see what is emphasized and can spot trends. It is well researched and justified in supporting materials. You can also buy a poster. Buy one for the kids or for your congressman!