Transparency is Bunk
aaronsw.com
aaronsw.com
We're just at the beginning of a new wave of data- and citizen-empowered watchdogging of government, and it would be a huge mistake to discount how valuable these government transparency projects are in opening up the process in fundamentally new ways. Yes, it's true that government still wants to hide its dirt and the data it discloses is often only part of the picture. But the more we open access to the existing data and involve people in connecting the dots, the greater the appetite and demand for even more transparency, of the sort even Aaron might find useful.
(My collegue Micah Sifry wrote this with me)
Back in the mid 90s, a company called Hamilton Securities created an online tool for analyzing flows of government money at the local level. It didn't work out so well for them:
http://www.dunwalke.com/11_Hamilton_Securities.htm
Much has changed since then. It's still going to be hard slog.
But people can (and do) use these tools to write books like the ones he links, and to pull data from different sources to uncover specific acts of corruption and malfeasance.
Databases are just as useful to reporters and authors as anonymous leaks and insider sources.
Doesn't sound like transparency to me. The authors point seems to be that efforts to be transparent, aren't actually. If Congress and others are hiding the 'good stuff', we need to work on making that transparent.
Aaron has noticed that a simple goal like "transparency" can't be immediately, directly implemented, because the system is such that it's like trying to dig a hole in water. Of course, you can put a hole in water, since that's what a boat is, but doing it incrementally (a piece here, a piece there, then bailing out the water, checking for leaks, etc) is going to be much more difficult than just building a boat out of the water and putting it in. Activists always seem to start out wanting to "just make these specific changes" from within the system, and that usually works, in general, when the changes are in the direction the system is already going, "with the flow," as it were.
If you want to make a change that is against the flow, it's far, far easier to make the change away from the system and then drop it in so that the system (government, a corporation, a church, or whatever) is forced to deal with it whole.
This is a very interesting topic: part economics, part psychology, part politics, and more; I've spent a lot of time thinking about it over the last 10 years, but I am just an egg, understanding little. :)
Re-reading, I notice that this is still unclear, so what I'm saying is that we need to focus on solutions that are primarily technical, because social and political solutions almost never work in the first place and tend to roll back as soon as the pressure lets up. The internet is killing copyright in a way that we anti-copyright folk would never have been able to do with "education" and "reform".
Really? I think the opposite. I can think of very few times where a social problem has been solved purely by technology.
(Anyway, I think the real answer is you need to attack the problem on all fronts at once)
Here are some candidates, some more arguable than others:
Slavery was destroyed by the steam engine.
World wars are no longer rushed into due to nuclear weapons.
The Pill contributed strongly to equal treatment for women.
The automobile changed sexual mores drastically (whether you view this as a "solved problem" or not).
Poverty itself was solved by technology (yeah, I know that statement will be controversial, but I think it's eminently defensible).
In fact, I think a case could be made that technology is the only thing that has ever solved a social problem in anything like a permanent fashion.
All that would happen as a result is there would be a 2 year back log of legislation, and it would take FOREVER for anything to get done.
The only real way to deal with corruption in government is to limit it's power. As long as there are people in power, some of them are going to become corrupt. That's just human nature. The best you can do is limit power, so that the damage they can do is minimized.
Actually, many states have open meeting laws where, if it becomes clear that politicians met and discussed certain topics, it is a crime, and it's punishable.
They don't often get used, but I think that the threat does alter behavior at least a bit.
The California legislature seems to meet constantly, and regularly spends time in extended sessions trying to pass overdue budgets in a never-ending fiscal crisis. California doesn't get any benefit from the extra official time its legislators put in, and Texas legislators aren't busy preplanning legislation the entire time they're out of session.
Given the fickleness of public opinion, there are natural limits as to how much planning months' ahead of time can help.