Transparent logic

I have been paying a bit of attention to the efforts of the current administration to make the government more open and transparent.

Particularly, today I spent a good bit of time on the USA Spending site. I was reading a review of the new IT spending section and decided to check it out. I was very impressed. The site was well organized, easy to navigate, and remarkably simple to personalize for things I was interested in. For instance, the Data Feeds section allowed me in the space of a minute to customize an RSS feed that I could use going forward to track budgeted vs actual spending across different government agencies.

I remember having a discussion with Anders Brownworth a long time ago, back when I thought open source was a really bad idea. I just could not get past why someone would do all the work to crank out a great product without getting paid for it, nor could I get my head around why open technology was better than proprietary technology. At the time, Anders said something that I have kept with me up to today, and that was that open source is not better because its free ( because its really not free ), but its better because it’s open. There are more eyeballs on it, more scrutiny, more ideas from different people that see the world in different ways.

My hope for things like this spending site is that the people that are really good at figuring out complex problems take the feeds that we now have available and start holding the government accountable. It’s a different kind of ‘open’, but I think the same principles apply. More eyeballs scrutinizing and analyzing the information can only help in the fight to keep government honest. I think this will be especially important when the health care reform engine really cranks up, assuming that legislation gets passed.

I spend a lot of time talking about how much I really don’t care for the current administration. However, on this subject I have to tip the cap and say ‘Well done.’