Recovery.gov's Data Transparency Called "Significant Failure" by Watchdog Group
The US Office of Management and Budget issued new reporting guidelines this week for recipients of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the normally polite geek watchdog organization the Sunlight Foundation has come out swinging.
"...[A]bsent from the new instruction is a requirement to make raw data public," Sunlight's co-founder and Executive Director, Ellen Miller, wrote this morning. "By not including raw data at Recovery.gov, transparency is dramatically reduced. Sunlight has argued strongly for raw data in machine readable formats as the starting point for Recovery.gov. This is a significant failure by the Administration to live up to its promise for full and complete disclosure. Significant failure."
The Recovery.gov site might surprise us and end up offering the data it collects in raw bulk formats, but without making preparation for that a requirement in reporting from recipients it seems unlikely to be done well, if at all.
Why would the Obama Administration not offer raw bulk data as part of its much celebrated transparency? One arguement against raw data came out of the woodwork during the successful push to get the US Senate to offer mashup-friendly XML (extensible markup language) feeds for Senate voting history. "The secretary of the Senate has cited a general standing policy," John Wonderlich, policy director at Sunlight, told Politico's Victoria McGrane, "that they're not supposed to present votes in a comparative format, that senators have the right to present their votes however they want to."
The Recovery.gov website is beautifully designed, but when the data being collected from federal recovery fund recipients is made available this October it will be hard to call it transparent if presentation of that data is done entirely by the hand of the government program being scrutinized. Raw data, freely available to the public, would allow for open-ended analysis by the community at large.
Sunlight's critique of the lack of raw data forthcoming from Recovery.gov follows questions about the effectiveness of the Administration's new Data.gov site, a would-be repository for government data that anyone can extract and analyze. We called that site disappointing when it launched in May and subsequent updates to the data offerings there have been uninspiring.
Meanwhile, the UK government has taken the question of raw data so seriously that it has employed Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web and one of the world's most prominent advocates for releasing raw data to the public.
While public discussion of these kinds of moves often focuses on "making information available online" - that's old news, folks. It's an increasingly data-centric world and we need that information as open as possible for a growing corps of citizen and non-governmental analysts, computer assisted reporters and others to work their magic on. The difference between the government reporting its own data on its own websites on one hand, or opening up access to the bulk data for other people to analyze on the other hand, is like the difference between watching a puppet show and being able to shine a light behind the stage to check yourself for injustices, improprieties and other insights we can't foresee before getting a chance to look. So far the October reporting on Recovery.gov appears set to be a puppet show.
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truly sad, but what other response can we expect from a network of powerful aristocrats than an insistence on adhering to generations-old protocols? we want open data, the boss-man says he wants open data... hopefully all parties will keep leaning on them. better yet, hold them accountable at election time. they only budge when they sense they're about to lose their jobs.
Posted by: Michael Calore
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June 25, 2009 11:44 AM
"Say it with me, "RAW DATA NOW""
-- Tim Berners-Lee ( http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html )
Data.gov claims to have a ton of raw data and while the library is growing, it seems that it's lacking quite a bit (last time I was there, the 'Technology' category was completely empty).
Even after giving the data out, who knows if we're simply looking at numbers the gov would prefer you use -- or if they are the real numbers. No sources urks me a bit, as re-branding data doesn't add to credibility.
Props to everybody at Sunlight for fighting the good fight -- hope they keep it up. As for RWW, Great article as always.
-Mike
Puppet show - haha I love it!
Great article and reporting. I love how Ellen felt the need to drill in that "Significant Failure" point - good for her.
I am certainly not an apologist for the Obama administration, but... it is important to remember that the level of transparency that they are trying to ring to the stimulus spending has never been done before. I would argue that it is the exception in the private sector -- most organizations to not have this kind of real-time view of their own spending. But it is also extremely unusual in the government. There are a handful of states that have accomplished this kind of transparency, but they generally have single financial management systems across the government -- a de facto standards. That makes publishing this data much easier. On the federal level, this simply has never been done. It has never been done on this scale. It has never been done on this time scale. And while the stimulus package provides money to federal agencies -- sometimes doubling their existing budgets.
In my conversations with the career government employees trying to lead these initiatives, there is little disagreement about the need for transparency. They are trying to figure out how to get there.
Recovery.gov's Data Transparency a "Significant Failure," says Sunlight Foundation :( http://bit.ly/1r4yF [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2329919951]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 12, 2009 10:38 AM
Excellent work!
This is my first visit to your website, and though I've missed the date to enter your blog into that competition (by 23 hours!), I've bookmarked you for next year (you've got my vote!!). :-)
Puppet show - haha I love it!
Great article and reporting. I love how Ellen felt the need to drill in that "Significant Failure" point - good for her.