Tree of Knowledge

I’ve been party to quite a few private debates with low level party hacks since Labor took government about the political merits for Labor of taking a holier than thou approach to government transparency in contrast to simply picking up the baton of Howard government shamelessness (and political success).

However, it seems pretty clear that the Rudd Government has moved towards the light and is grasping the transparency nettle.

In this light, the government should really have a look at the petition currently floating around the UK (and plugged today on Guido Fawkes) to convert all Parliamentary documentation into XML format.

For the non-geeks XML is simply an Internet coding language like HTML. However, it’s far superior to HTML because it separates the form of a webpage from its content. Why is this important? Well this allows other geeks to automatically grab the content from the page and re-package it in other formats (eg iGoogle, bloglines) or importantly databases that allow for the analysis of the data.

It’s a key driver for the ‘crowd-sourcing’/'collective intelligence’ trends on the web and would dramatically increase government accountability.

Barack Obama seemed to commit to something like this at a candidate forum at Google last year:

I’ll put government data online in universally accessible formats. I’ll let citizens track federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contacts. I’ll let you participate in government forums, ask questions in real time, offer suggestions that will be reviewed before decisions are made, and let you comment on legislation before it is signed. And to ensure that every government agency is meeting 21st century standards, I’ll appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer.

In fact, as Jeff Jarvis has been arguing at Buzz Machine there’s a reasonable argument that technological change allows us to turn the Freedom of Information Act ‘inside-out’ and that ALL government documents should be published in XML.

* Abolish the Freedom of Information Act. Turn it inside-out. Why should we be asking for information about and from our government? The government should have to ask to keep things from us. Government information — every act of government on our behalf — should be free by default. We must insist on an aggressive ethic of openness. The exceptions should be rare: the personal business of citizens, national security, ongoing criminal investigations and court cases (while they are ongoing), and little else.

In the past, the physical means of information simply did not allow for this; file cabinets filled with papers could not be open to every inspector all the time. But digital files can be. When all business is transacted digitally, it can be captured, stored, and opened to search and analysis. We must insist on it — and not just from the executive branch (as is the case with the current FOIA) but from all branches, and not just from the federal government but from all levels of government. Sunshine everywhere.

(This concept will no doubt be further developed in his upcoming book What Would Google Do?)

However, even without further reform of this kind, the Americans are a long way ahead of both Australia and the UK in terms of government transparency on the net (see especially the Sunlight Foundation)

As I say, there’s a real debate about the political benefits of implementing policies like this, but the policy case for strengthening government accountability is pretty strong.

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