Reviewing Government Spending in Real-Time

Developing a website to make government records, especially financial records, transparent can be a monumental and expensive task.  That’s why I’m impressed by the pains taken by New York City to make its innovative Checkbook software available to all.

In January, 2013, an open source platform based on New York City’s Checkbook NYC 2.0 was introduced on YouTube by Comptroller John C. Liu.

The application is available now to any state or local government.  It enables the public to search easily from a dashboard and review government spending in real-time.  

Government contracts and underlying sub-contracts are absorbed and integrated into the website, so overspending can be observed as soon as it begins.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb98yCJPFSw

Karl Fogel of Open Tech Strategies, LLC wrote, “...the release of the Checkbook NYC code...is significant because of a larger initiative that accompanies it. Long before the code release, the Comptroller's Office started a serious planning process to ensure that the code could be easily adopted by other municipalities, supported by other vendors, and eventually become a long-term multi-stakeholder project...”

“Most cities run an internal financial management system (FMS) of some kind. The FMS manages the city's expenses, revenue, contracts, payroll, and budget, and naturally allows authorized access only. New York City's FMS just exports its non-sensitive data fields on a regular basis to Checkbook NYC—the export is filtered so that any sensitive data never even goes into the public-facing Checkbook system.”

New York’s Comptroller asked FMS vendors “...to contribute in-kind resources to Checkbook maintenance and development—especially to smooth the Checkbook deployment process. That way you'd lower the bar to Checkbook adoption for many cities at one stroke, and at the same time get multiple vendors involved in the code base.”

http://opensource.com/government/13/6/open-source-checkbook

Rebecca Williams of the Sunlight Foundation reported, “...in addition to the spending and expenditure information most similar platforms display, [NYC’s Checkbook] includes information about other essential financial datasets (including budgets, revenue, contracts, and payroll), as well.”

“...this might be the first instance of city officials proactively and premeditatively building civic applications with the intent of having other cities -- and cities with varied software vendors at that -- use and contribute to making that software better.”

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/10/the-future-of-civic-software-reuse/

We should encourage adoption of Checkbook NYC 2.0 in state agencies, counties and municipalities throughout the country.

Coordinating FOIA and Open Government

The importance of coordinating the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Open Government (OpGov) initiatives is reflected in a recent article from the Philippines.  Perhaps I was too quick in the preceding post to accept and approve the separation of OpGov from FOIA.

Excerpts:

“ ‘The primary goal of data.gov.ph is to foster a citizenry empowered to make informed decisions, and to promote efficiency and transparency in government,’ it says on its website.”

“[Gladys Regalado, deputy national coordinator of the Computer Professionals’ Union] added, ‘It is too early to tell if the open data web portal will enhance transparency, accountability and citizen engagement.’ “

“Regalado also stressed that, ‘open data initiatives should not be a substitute to a Freedom of Information Act,’ which she pointed out, ‘can mandate what kind of data will be 'open' to the public to ensure transparency.’ ”

" ‘With the current culture of corruption...where information is hidden purposely, it would be difficult to find data that can actually help in transparency and good governance. We should have an (sic) FOIA and more patriotic whistleblowers and not just a repository website,’ Regalado said.”   http://www.interaksyon.com/article/79278/only-foi-not-ph-data-portal-can-guarantee-transparency---computer-experts

Stateside, a recent op-ed piece put it succinctly:  “The state... and our biggest municipalities* should build on the state's FOIA law and adopt comprehensive open data policies. All public records, save those that would violate privacy laws or undermine security, should be proactively made available to the public for free on the Internet in a structured, sortable, downloadable format.”

http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/the-open-data-revolution-is-coming/Content?oid=3187194

*As I pointed out in the preceding post, the mandate mentioned above should apply to small municipalities, as well.

       

The Gap Between FOIA and Open Government

In view of the widening gap between FOIA (disclosure on request), which is too much about politics and trying without much success to update legislation, and Open Government (proactive disclosure), which is mostly about technology, perhaps we should devote less time to the former and concern ourselves more with the latter.

Open Government technology is being implemented in progressive cities throughout the country without waiting for legislative FOIA upgrades.  The drive to grow and prosper, including competition for new businesses, will compel communities to improve transparency.

I wanted to learn about less expensive technology available to smaller communities, so I asked Rebecca Williams at the Sunlight Foundation for help.  She compiled the following list of suggestions:

• Just putting data up on the government website for download! [in open formats like csv please]
• Ideascale (and other social media outlets) for citizen engagement
• Hosting data on GitHub
• Hosting data via Google Fusion tables
• CKAN data portals are free and open source, but you have to pay for the server
• Civic Data provides a free portal option via Accela (this is new and I [Rebecca] haven't seen it used yet)

If you know a village, township or small city council person, supervisor, mayor or manager wrestling with transparency issues, please pass along this list and let me know what feedback you get.