11 September 2009
Crowdsourcing Goverment Oversight
Posted by Connor under: Internet; Politics; Transparency .
Returning to a theme here with some updated links.
One of the best features of the Internet is the ability to bring people who are dispersed all over together to work on like-minded projects. This can be don ad-hoc by self-forming groups or by private concerns. Either way, crowdsourcing is a powerful tool. Wikipedia, who I just linked to there is the most obvious example.
Another example is the ability to use crowdsourcing as a way to keep tabs on the government both as I’ve recently mentioned efforts by both the government and private companies who are doing this.
A new entry into this field is washingtonwatch.com, which attempts to track all congressional earmarks. But the story of how washingtonwatch was conceived is every bit as interesting as the site itself.
After the recent birth of a child, Andi Brown scaled back her work hours and began to telecommute from home. That left her with a bit of extra time to get involved with Jim Harper’s Washington Watch project. Harper, a Cato Institute scholar and privacy/transparency advocate, launched a website earlier this year that hoped to use the power of crowdsourcing to collate every single earmark request made by every single member of Congress. In only weeks, the job was done.
Right now, senators and representatives release earmark requests, but no government entity collects, sorts, and maps them. Getting the information requires digging through 535 different websites, each putting the 42,000+ bits of earmark information in a different place and offering it in a slightly different format.
When Harper launched his site and asked people to join him in digging up the earmark requests and submitting them to his new database and mapping system, he had no idea what to expect. Those first few days of waiting to see who would show up to help felt like throwing a party and having no one show up for the first hour, he tells Ars. Would anyone come at all?
A small group did arrive to help—about 40 people—and Andi was one of the most prolific. From her home in Missouri, she trolled Congressional websites, unearthed each representative’s requests for directed government payouts, and copied the data into the Washington Watch database at a terrific pace… 1,500 to 2,000 entries per week.
This of course opens the door to the entire subject of earmarks, the bete noir of last fall’s election campaign. Leaving that aside for the moment, here is the link to Bruce Braley’s entry. It is five pages long and includes the usual list of research projects at UNI, highway and economic development funding requests. Included therein are also requests for Clinton and Camanche wastewater treatement funds, 19th Avenue North in Clinton, Washington Blvd in Camanche, the Railport, etc.
Everybody hates pork, unless it fails to appear on their table.