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.

The question then becomes twofold. One, how are we going to learn to live with this new reality? Two, will the tools of transparency remain exclusively in the hands of authorities beyond the reach of normal people? Brin posits that a fully transparent society where the means of transparency are open to all can be a good thing. We will all have to live a bit more circumspectly and we will all have to get used to the fact that everyone has peccadilloes, and that’s okay. But it will transform our economy and politics by opening up the workings of everything to everyone.

In the matter of the second question we can see the impacts in our politics easily. It is now a pretty unassailable truth that it is impossible to keep a secret any more. This truth has yet to be internalized by those in power, of course. A fact demonstrated almost daily from the exposure of the warrantless wiretapping program by an alert technician, to Governor Sanford’s, “Appalachian Trail” dodge. Embracing transparency is happening too. OpenSecrets.org is a terrific example of non-profit, community production of transparency. OpenSecrets data is used by both parties as well as by activist groups to show how money influences the political process.

You’ve heard of open source software. It’s the free software built by volunteers and non-profit corporations that ends up in things like Linux and Mozilla Firefox. Christine Petersen, of the Foresight Institute, coined the term, “open source” in the late 1990’s. Now she has a similar and similarly radical proposal: open source sensing. Her vision is to take the principles of collective production and free, sharable and extensible technology advances in software, and to extend them to the area of sensing and observation. In short, letting everyone own the means of making the Transparent Society a two-way street.

We The People Are Watchers. The link also includes a video of Ms. Petersen’s presentation at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in 2008.

“The intent of the project is to take advantage of advances in sensing to improve both security and the environment, while preserving — even strengthening — privacy, freedom, and civil liberties,” says Peterson in a recent press release.

“There is a basic question of whether citizens have a ‘right to sense,’ or can we only own and use sensors that the government permits. It’s not a simple question, but I believe we need to clarify this right.”

“Cheap, ubiquitous sensing has the potential to turn the worlds of privacy and civil rights upside-down,” says Brad Templeton, a futurist and civil rights activist who chairs the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Speaking to this “top-down” government-driven approach, Templeton said, “It often results in keeping rules and procedures secret. A classic example is Transportation (TSA) agents at the airport. We can’t see all their rules and procedures because it would help the bad guys to get through.”

In contrast, a “bottom-up,” decentralized, open source approach to sensing and defense is one in which –- when it does not jeopardize the public –- “everyone can see the rules to the sensing approach. You know what the enemy knows and have a chance to fix it.”

Peterson clarifies, “Both environmental and security uses of sensors are intrinsically bottom-up in terms of the data-gathering process. By doing that gathering thoughtfully, we can get the data we need without infringing on individual rights.”

Sousveillance (or inverse surveillance) is a term coined by Steve Mann to describe the bottom-up recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity. This is a way of taking “surveillance” to the people using portable or wearable recording devices that can stream continuous live video to the Internet. People, rather than governments, become the watchers. “It’s not enough for governments to watch people; people have to watch governments,”says Templeton. “We’re not getting access to what’s going on. Technology can allow the public to watch what’s going on.” In other words, sousveillance is surveillance from underneath (this is the meaning of the French word ’sous’).

Templeton continues: “No easy solution stands out, but the quest for an answer to these problems — by learning from the bottom-up approaches of the open source community — may provide some water in the desert.”

Peterson adds, “In the long term, open source defensive technologies will likely be the only ones capable of keeping up with rapidly-advancing offensive technologies, just as open source software is faster at addressing computer viruses today.”

It is true that many states and municipalities have made their citizen’s lives easier by putting so much information on the web. But, in too may areas there is still a fundamental misunderstanding of exactly the type of sea-change that the Internet is bringing to society and governance.

Here is an excerpt of a teriffic post by Tom Steinberg of the UK-based mysociety.org, which builds community organizing and open government websites, called What The Government Doesn’t Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It:

Current government policy in relation to the Internet can broadly be summarised as occupying three areas:

1. Getting people online (broadband access, and lessons for people who don’t have the skills or interest)
2. Protecting people from bad things done using the Internet (terrorism, child abuse, fraud, hacking, intellectual property infringement)
3. Building websites for departments and agencies.

The government does all these things primarily because it believes that the Internet boosts the economy of the UK, and that IT can reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality. Together, these outweigh the dangers, meaning it doesn’t get banned. Gordon Brown’s recent speech at Google was an exemplar of this mainly economically driven celebration of the Internet’s virtues, telling audience members that your industry is driving the next stage of globalisation”.

The first challenge for the government is to understand that whilst these beliefs are true, they are only a minor part of the picture. Tellingly, Browns’ speech contained almost no language that couldn’t have been used to explain the positive impact of electrification or shipping containers.

What is different is the way in which the Internet changes social and economic practices – the vector of attack. In the 20th century, advancement of human welfare went hand in hand with the rise of companies that used economies of scale to deliver better goods and services for customers. Technology effectively made it possible and much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.

Now take a look for a moment at Wikipedia, MoneySavingExpert, Blogger or Match.com – all big websites, all doing different things. Each one, however, is in its own way is reducing the ability of large, previously well functioning institutions to function as easily.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.

Disruption like this is scary for any institution, which will tend to mean that as a public entity which interfaces with other institutions the temptation will be to hold back the sea, not swim with it. Government must swim with the tide, though, not just to help citizens more but to avoid the often ruinous tension of a citizenry going one way and a government going another. There are various things government can do to be on the right side.

1. Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.”

2. Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve similar or identical ends. It is time to start building systems to allow them to contact people in a similar situation, just as they’d be able to if queuing together in a job centre, but with far more reach and power. This does open the scary possibility that citizens might club together to protest about poor service or bad policies, but given recent news, if you were a minister would you rather know about what was wrong as soon as possible, or really late in the day (cf MPs‘ expenses, festering for years)?

The killer app of the Internet as it relates to human politics and governance is not any sorf of enabling of direct democacy, which is simply too unwieldy for a handful of people let alone hundreds of millions. Instead it is the ability to maintain honesty in government through distributing the load of watchdogging it among millions.

Take the groundbreaking recovery.gov: “The site will include information about Federal grant awards and contracts as well as formula grant allocations. Federal agencies will provide data on how they are using the money, and eventually, prime recipients of Federal funding will provide information on how they are using their Federal funds. On our end, we will use interactive graphics to illustrate where the money is going, as well as estimates of how many jobs are being created, and where they are located. And there will be search capability to make it easier for you to track the funds.”

This is groundbreaking in the sense that this is the first time an administration has seriously attempted to embrace the Internet not as an extension of existing media but as a new medium in its own right. But it is still not up to snuff, it still shows an attitude that the primary role of the Internet is to reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality — in this case making it faster and cheaper and more efficient to maintain a (albeit well-intentioned) veil of accountability for the massive spending being undertaken.

The recovery.gov site is kind of clunky. It also doesn’t go very deep. Mousing over the map of Iowa for example shows that $1,08 billion has been announced for Iowa. Clicking on Iowa takes you to a list of spending programs (of which the state budget stabilization fund is at the top at $472 million) for which money has been allocated. And… that’s pretty much it.

On the other hand, recovery.org is far more in depth. At their website, I can see that there are 291 active projects valued at $250.4 milion. I can drill down by county to see that Clinton has 2 active projects valued at $1.6 million and by drilling down further I can see that those two projects are for replacement buses for the Transit Authority.

Now, recovery.org is the product of onvia.com, a for-profit organizaiton that helps companies find state and fedral contract opportunities. They have a large research staff that combs federal, state and local media to glean this detailed information and post it not only for the benefit of their customers but free for everyone. Onvia’s information is not complete, just showing what projects are currently open for bid, instead of all projects planned, let and in progress or complete. But that’s okay, that’s not what Onvia is about.

What it does show is the power of community production and how the creative collective production that creates something like Wikipedia can be harnessed to keep our government accountable. And while things like recovery.org can scale up to the national level, they can also be scaled down to the state and local level.

Limiting the power of government to take precedence over the rights of individuals is crucial. ProReforma puts it this way in one of its educational brochures: “No country, in no time has had success with a democratic model that grants the right of excessive intervention to government.” Yet Guatemala keeps trying to make it work. “Through six decades since World War II and after many attempts” by all sides, be they “populists or elitists, civilians or soldiers, from the left or from the right, it is evident that the system of intervention, mercantilism and paternalism has produced neither prosperity nor peace.”

How would strong individual rights change the future? Mr. Ayau argues that when individual rights always trump interests the culture that underfunds and politicizes the courts will begin to change. As to poverty, consider that would-be entrepreneurs are barred from competing in many markets because powerful interests make the rules and regulations. Without a market economy the country cannot create wealth.

There is nothing new in the classical liberal argument for individual rights. What is new here is the scope of this project. Recognizing that the beneficiaries of its proposed reform are ordinary Guatemalans whose rights are regularly violated by the political class, ProReforma has spent two years on a national education campaign.

Tapping into popular frustration, a campaign brochure argues that Guatemalans must do more than chase the “vain illusion” that “some day a good and illuminated man will come to power.” They must force change to “a style of government that will facilitate success for whoever comes to power.”

ProReforma needed 5,000 petition signatures for its proposal to be introduced into Congress for debate; it has collected more than 73,000. Now the ideological left has begun a campaign of its own, marked by vituperative and personal attacks against ProReforma’s promoters. The proposal might be defeated, but the good news is that ProReforma’s civic education project has already succeeded. Today, more Guatemalans are aware of their inalienable rights. The question is how they can wrest those rights from the collectivist left.

Where to find on-the-scene reports via twitter: El Periodico, Noticias Guatemala, Prensa Libre. Also, follow #escandalogt. Some Guatemalan twitterers were saying last night they planned to print out “V for Vendetta” masks and wear them en masse to the demonstrations today. Organizers on Twitter urged all who planned to participate to report anomalies or rights abuses by authorities, and observe cautionary guidelines to avoid violence.

Online reports are coming in that governors, under duress from the state, have used public funds to ship busloads of primarily poor, indigenous citizens from the interior and north of the country to participate in government-planned pro-Colom demonstrations. Twitterers on the scene say the government-organized, pro-Colom demonstrations number about 2,500 participants as of 10am PT and include a patriotic musical performance.

This sign reads: I WILL NOT BE AFRAID TO GO OUT INTO THE STREETS, DEFEND MY LIBERTY, UPHOLD THE LAW, DEMAND JUSTICE, I WILL NOT BE AFRAID TO LIVE IN MY HOMELAND AND CHANGE ITS FUTURE…. GUATEMALA, I WILL NOT ABANDON YOU.

How does mass collaboration and open, instantaneous communication change the political rules? Well, there’s the case of the so-called Twitter Revolution in Moldova where Twitter was — or maybe not — central in organizing protests against the allegedly stolen parliamentary election of April 5.

And Twitter as a way to organize flashmobs and quickly disseminate information is ideal for the type of role it may or may not have played in Moldova. However, when we take in social media in all of its totality — blogs, Twtter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. — the lesson is all about radical, enforced transparency; the hard fact — that many people are going tol have to learn the hard way – that there is almost no way to keep anything a secret any more.

A very interesting example is happening right now in Guatemala. Follow this one if you can. Xeni Xardin of Boing Boingis all over this.

The Guatemalan bank Banrural is at the center of the country’s current political crisis: the recently assassinated attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg represented a finance expert, Khalil Musa, who was said to have refused to participate in corrupt transactions involving that bank. Musa was assassinated in March. After continuing to make statements about alleged government complicity in that murder, and in the financial crimes Musa protested, Rosenberg was himself shot to death this past Sunday. Days before his murder, Rosenberg recorded a video saying he believed he would soon be assassinated by forces acting at the orders of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom. After his death, the video spread virally on YouTube (link to video in Spanish), sparking widespread protests on and offline.

[May 14], Twitter user “Jeanfer” was arrested for suggesting in a tweet that people who had money deposited in Banrural should remove those funds, and by doing so, break the control that “corrupt people” have over the state-controlled financial institution.

That was yesterday. By today, Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, aka “jeanfer” had been arraigned, tried and sentenced. Now that is some efficient justice right there. Fernandez was ordered to jail until he can pay a fine of $6,500 (more than the average Guatemalan’s annual income) and then to be under house arrest indefinitely.

As of now, there are massive street protests. More Twitterers are being sought by the police while twitter traffic on the matter explodes. The government has issued a list of persons who must not be allowed to leave the country. And the FBI is getting involved.

All in all this is shaping up into what looks like a social media driven revolution that was set off by revelations exposed to the entire world through that media. Ten years ago, this would have been a conspiracy known only to a few human rights lawyers and would have meant business as usual in Guatemala. Not anymore.