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Comment by ShabbyDoo | Hacker News Reader

I have wondered for some time what the effect would be of the following transparency experiment:

With an experienced investigative journalist as a mentor, "deploy" a handful of young journalists to report via a blog-esque medium on the politics of some randomly chosen small city. What would happen if every police incident was investigated to find out if the powerful were granted special treatment? If every claim made in a city council meeting was verified? If every motive behind every vote was examined? How about tracing down budget expenditures to see who was scheming to defraud taxpayers? Would the city's citizens care enough to even read the blog? Would this transparency change government for the better? It certainly would give Americans a baseline for the level of corruption and inefficiency in local governments.

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There are a few programs in the U.S. that do that. I got to be part of one back in 2007, News 21, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation. To your point, just having someone from the outside skeptically examining official claims led to people losing their jobs: http://newsinitiative.org/story/2007/08/28/holy_land_experie...

That's the follow-on piece to a longer story that's apparently only readable in raw HTML now:

http://newsinitiative.org/story/2007/08/23/the_holy_land_exp...

It didn't take much for the leadership change to happen there. I read a few stories about the place getting acquired by a T.V. network with a bad reputation. I interviewed as many people as I could by phone over a few weeks. Then I flew there and spent 3 days wandering the park interviewing as many people as I could. Then I wrote out the story they had told me and my editors worked it over a bit to help it hang together better. When it was published, it didn't seem like I'd actually found anything terribly interesting.

However the simple fact of stitching everyone's testimonies together was enough to show that the company's leaders weren't all telling the story people thought they were, and that led to the ouster.

The News21 program recruited about 100 graduate journalism students, gave us each $7500, and had us report on very narrow topics for 3 months. My team was assigned to "religion and public life" and while this was a private theme park, it was a place where religious themes were displayed very openly. Others in our group went to Mount Rushmore for 4th of July, which is apparently a very religious affair, the Mormon pagaents in upstate NYC, and so on.

Fascinating that you've actually done this! What is sad to me is how little effort was required to bring about this level of transparency. I'm not suggesting that you did not work hard on this series, but it's not like 10 investigators spent a year interviewing everyone possibly connected. Perhaps the bright side is that you've demonstrated the potential upside of non-profit transparency work by showing how low-hanging the fruit might be.

Even among well-respected government institutions, requiring real answers to real questions is regarded as a little bit rude. The sophisticated ones will suffer it, knowing such questioners don't really matter much. But the people asking the questions are never brought "inside" to where the real decisions get made.

If there were more people asking real questions, and more higher placed and public people, it would get a lot harder to sideline such gadflies.

The real shame is that our institutions and culture could rise to a higher standard if required to. Today's concessions to political "necessity" forestall tomorrow's advance to systems that actually work.

The act of measuring would change the behavior. In this way, transparency activism suffers the same phenomenon as security: doing the job right yields an environment in which there is no apparent need for doing the job right.

Interesting point. I wonder what graph of oversight level vs. corruption level looks like. I'm sure the point of diminishing returns occurs at only 1/10th a dedicated journalist. However, the marginal societal value (cost of corruption compared to cost of oversight) might continue to be positive for awhile as investigators are added.

The need is perfectly apparent to those who read history and political philosophy.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- but this sentiment is inconvenient to any number of political projects, both right and left, and so frowned upon as unconstructive and paranoid.

I doubt it would change much. It's hard to get politicans to make statments that can be falsified. Watch some episodes of the brilliant "Yes Minster" to see what I mean.

"Well, in the fullness of time, given the most up to date information, subject to the findings of the interdepartmental crossparty study group, and dependant on the budgetry contrainsts, I believe something to be likely to be the type of programme that would, given there are no unforeseen circumstances, lead to positive net job growth"

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