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24 September 2008

Government as API provider

The authors of "Government Data and the Invisible Hand" provide some interesting advice about how the next president can make the government more transparent:

If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

I've blogged here a couple of times about the role transparency-minded programmers and other private actors are playing in opening up access to government data sources. This paper draws the logical policy conclusion from what we've seen in the instances I blogged about: that third parties often do a better job of bringing important government data to the people than the government does. (For example, compare govtrack.us/opencongress.org with http://thomas.loc.gov.) The upshot of the paper is that the government should make it easier for those third parties to make the government websites look bad. By focusing on providing structured data, the government will save web developers some of the hassle involved in parsing and combining data from unwieldy government sources and reduce the time between the release of a clunky government site and the release of private site that repackages the underlying data and combines it with new sources in an interesting way.

Of course, to the extent that government data is made available in more convenient formats, our work as academic researchers gets easier too, and we can spend more time on analysis and less on data wrangling. In fact, for people doing social science stats, it's really the structured data and not the slick front-end that is important (although many of the private sites provide both).

I understand that this policy proposal is an idea that's been circulating for a while (anyone want to fill me in on the history?) and apparently both campaigns have been listening. It will be interesting to see whether these ideas lead to any change in the emphasis of government info policy.

Posted by Andy Eggers at 9:09 AM