{"id":262,"date":"2010-05-18T15:19:11","date_gmt":"2010-05-18T19:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/?p=262"},"modified":"2010-05-20T16:25:58","modified_gmt":"2010-05-20T20:25:58","slug":"transparency-and-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/2010\/05\/18\/transparency-and-attention\/","title":{"rendered":"Transparency and Attention"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last couple of years (let\u2019s pick a random title and call it \u201cThe Obama Era\u201d) we\u2019ve seen a movement develop, spearheaded by groups like the Sunlight Foundation<\/a> and enabled by some innovative<\/a> thinkers in the White House, around open government data and transparency.\u00a0 The movement has been wildly successful in publishing reams and reams of local, state and federal government data (in the US and abroad) in machine-readable formats online.\u00a0 Amazing tools are being built to harness that data and make it accessible.\u00a0 In the U.S., Maplight.org<\/a> tracks campaign donations and their connection to legislative votes.\u00a0 Global Voices\u2019 Technology for Transparency Project<\/a> has done a breathtaking job collecting and analyzing a slew of\u00a0 international transparency projects. \u00a0The next stage of this phenomenon is creating programs to make meaning from that data, put context around it, and deliver it to citizens in a way that helps them become better decision makers.\u00a0 ProPublica<\/a> and OpenCongress<\/a> are good examples of this model.<\/p>\n

The push for transparency and accountability that drives this movement is based on a few important assumptions:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0\u00a0 that \u201csunlight is the best disinfectant,\u201d and that as information is exposed corruption will dwindle;<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0 that the sets of data that are most important to expose are those that involve finances (agency budgets, campaign donations, earmarks, that sort of thing);<\/p>\n

3)\u00a0\u00a0 that when this information is made public citizens will be empowered to use it to make enlightened decisions about policy, officials, budget priorities, etc.<\/p>\n

For these assumptions to hold true we have a lot more work to do than just make sure information is free and available.\u00a0 Transparency only matters if the end result is delivering information to citizens, which means storytelling is still a very important function\u2014probably more important than it\u2019s ever been\u2014in American democracy.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, our storytelling institutions are failing.\u00a0\u00a0 Today\u2019s corporate, profit-driven media outlets are much too focused on catching eyeballs so they can sell ads to do the hard work of translating policy information to citizens.\u00a0 And as we all know the crisis of the news business model means there are fewer journalists employed by these organizations to engage in this translation process even if they wanted to.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to know what the impact will be on our information diets as new media ventures\u2014like blogs, hyperlocal news sites, and non-profit web-based models\u2014rise to fill the void left by traditional media. \u00a0In order to discern the impact of this shift in news\u2014or, for that matter, whether a shift is really happening\u2014it\u2019s vital to extend the concept of transparency to that equally essential democratic institution\u2014the press.\u00a0 We need tools to uncover patterns of attention as much as patterns of corruption.<\/p>\n

Those of us who are working to promote civic engagement should be asking: What stories get reported?\u00a0 How do those stories get told?\u00a0 Who\u2019s telling them?\u00a0 Are blogs really as entrepreneurial and disruptive as we like to think, or are they simply amplifying stories that the MSM has already told?\u00a0 Where do stories start and how do they get picked up?<\/p>\n

Right now we\u2019re making decisions as citizens assuming we have the best available set of information.\u00a0\u00a0 If we had answers to the questions above it\u2019d be easier for news consumers (and reporters for that matter) to understand what we\u2019re missing.\u00a0 We could finally know what it is that we don\u2019t know and potentially shift the demand for news coverage away from inanity and conflict (which, admittedly, sells ads) and towards rich, complex coverage of policy and its consequences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last couple of years (let\u2019s pick a random title and call it \u201cThe Obama Era\u201d) we\u2019ve seen a movement develop, spearheaded by groups like the Sunlight Foundation and enabled by some innovative thinkers in the White House, around open government data and transparency.\u00a0 The movement has been wildly successful in publishing reams and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2061,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2061"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions\/265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}