Recently I’ve found myself immersed in something called transparency. Truly, this is an important subject to anyone who works hard that they have very little time for important civic activities. Why should the average person be interested in transparency? It comes down to this. Most of us don’t have the time to go to the city council meeting, school board, hearings or the state capital, let alone make a trip to DC.
Well implemented government transparency programs make it easier for those people with the time and will, to keep a watchful eye on government. I’ll admit this, I don’t like going to meetings and for most people, they’d probably find something better to do than fight the local water board over its .01 % increase in sale tax, that should have ended 20 years ago. For the one individual willing to fight this battle, why not support their efforts?
Regardless of the individual’s incentive to act as a whistle blower, I believe that the more people monitoring what government is doing, the better. So why do so few people take action? For the same reason that I’d rather work on the old car than go down to the water board, I don’t want to deal with the hassle.
Warning: Geekism starts now. That is why I’ve started researching government transparency through web technology. There are two acronyms that I think everyone should become aquatinted with XML and WSAPI.
Let’s start with my assumptions and biases. I’m a web application programmer. Look at some of my work. I know there are armies of people like me hacking away late into the night working on the next big idea like Youtube or Ebay. Yes, I am one of these guys. When corporations like Google or Ebay offer people like me access to their internal databases interesting things can happen. At the beginning of the personal computer revolution, companies like Microsoft and Apple gained access to the back rooms of corporations like IBM and Xerox. Both used their access to these organizations to build their own companies nitch. Back then, the concept of letting outsiders into the research and development lab had to be a foreign concept. Today, companies like Google and Ebay grant software developers access to these lab to their benefit.
This concept is called API. (Application Programming Interface) Rather than letting Gates and Jobs into the storage warehouse as happened in the 80’s, companies like Google allow armies of developers into the warehouse via the internet.
Once in the warehouse, the developer can use structured data, serialized machine readable format or in one example (XML), to load Google’s data directly into their own code. It’s sort of a library system that makes it very easy to load large amounts of Google data into the developer’s own system. This process removes the need for the trip to google and copy to a blank DVD. The whole process is sped up. Not only does the developer get access, but the developer can access specific pieces of data in realtime.
Now to the example: Google granted me access to their mapping service for the school choice website I developed with my then colleagues at the Independence Institute, maps.google.com in real-time via the Google maps API. code.google.com/apis/maps/. At this point, my colleagues at Independence Institute data mined all the schools in the state of Colorado. Then they added their own research which they conducted for each school into their own Colorado Public Schools database. Using the Google maps API and their database, I mashed the two worlds together into a single web interface that allows parents to find school choice options by typing in their home address. Without Google offering such a service, the parents of Colorado would need to consult multiple district websites and school websites when researching public education options in their area. In some cases, parents might need to visit 30 different sites make numerous phone calls or even make multiple trips to accomplish the task this website offers.
Now, imagine the hardest part of developing this website came in the data mining process. Someone, an II staffer in this case, had to find all the schools, and then research each school individually to build their database. In a perfect world, this information should be as easily accessible as the Google mapping interface, right? It should not be surprising to anyone that governments typically do not offer this sort of access to their databases. In the few cases that it has been attempted, they couldn’t seem to get it right. XML or similar data format is a must. And, for the sake of everyone’s time, a Google WS-API is required.
What is the WS-API? (Web Services Application Programming Interface) This means that as the developer of a new transparency website that focuses on transparency in government expenditures for the state of Colorado, my website’s visitor can ask for a specific piece of information from the state’s database, without my website needing to do a ton of extra work, in less time than it takes my website visitor to click submit. This is the basic concept behind a mash-up. The goal is multiple databases being accessed simultaneously across vast differences in location, political philosophy or individual identity.
The overall concept is simple, make information that is currently publicly accessible, quicker to obtain and easier to evaluate. The implications of this technology will create a giant leap forward in government transparency. Whistleblowers everywhere, regardless of ideology or motivation will rejoice at no longer needing to make trips to some government agency to just figure out their tax rates and parents might find it easier to research the best school option for their child.
