Joshua Tauberer’s Blog

In May, the Congress passed the 2008 Farm Bill, which regulates various food, nutrition, and apparently biofuel issues. Tufts food policy professor Parke Wilde writes on his blog today:

The 629-page text (.pdf) of the 2008 Farm Bill is so complex and unreadable that the U.S. food policy community has been on the edge of our seats waiting for the USDA/ERS side-by-side comparison unveiled today.

The ERS side-by-side tool compares the new Farm Bill with current law, title by title, so we can finally begin to understand what the law really means.

ERS is the USDA’s Economic Research Service. Their side-by-side webpage, which I think was just published this week, shows the provisions of the previous and the current bill side-by-side. (It’s not a comparison of the bill text, but of summaries of the provisions.)

This is interesting on a number of accounts. First, the fact that it is the USDA making this comparison suggests that everyone agrees that the bill itself is effectively incomprehensible even to professionals and scholars on account of its size and summarizing it is costly enough that only the government would do it, taking three months to prepare.

Second, if this is what was needed to understand the Farm Bill, was it passed without anyone understanding it?

Third- This comparison was made by and for professionals and scholars, not by tech geeks. Why aren’t we talking to them?

The ERS tool comes complete with a seemingly unintentionally hilarious intro video — overly dramatic with background music fit for the Miss Universe competition. (Wilde likened it to “a documentary by Kenneth Burns or an account of a manned mission to the moon”.)

I’m ecstatic. All right, so this all goes back to late 2006, a bunch of people sitting at their computers writing some emails about what Congress should do with data. I distinctly remember Dan Newman and I both thinking that the Library of Congress should make its raw legislative database (that powers THOMAS) available directly to us to build applications off of, rather than the screen-scraping that I was doing. One thing leads to another, the Open House Project, the legislative databases section of the OHP report in May 2007 (which I principally wrote), then later that year with the support of Rep. Mike Honda, in November CHA asked the LOC to look into the issue (more), and then in the last month his office submitted text for the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Report, which made it through subcommittee markup of the bill, to give this request a little more teeth (like, ehm, the force of law).

His office also submitted a second paragraph which I’ll get to below.

Rob Pierson in Honda’s office writes on the OHP mail list:

I’ve mentioned on the list some of the steps my boss (Congressman Honda) has been taking, with counsel from many folks on this list, to guide Congressional policies on the path towards effectively leveraging technology to open up access to the public. There are actually quite a few other staffers who also follow this list, and we’ve certainly learned quite a bit from the conversations posted here, so I wanted to throw out a quick note of appreciation to everyone who has been contributing to the discussions.

With guidance from the conversations on this list (and the OHP report), Congressman Honda recently submitted the following sections into the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Report. The following (or possibly very similar versions) were included in the Leg Branch Subcommittee markup of the bill:

*Public Access to Legislative Data (as submitted)*

The Committee believes that the public should have improved access to legislative information through more advanced search capabilities such as those available through the Library of Congress’ Legislative
Information System. The Committee also supports enhancing public access to legislative documents, bill status, summary information, and other legislative data, through more direct methods such as bulk data downloads and other means of no-charge digital access to legislative databases. The Committee requests that the Library and Government Printing Office report on the progress towards these goals within 90 days of enactment of this Act.

Note that the GPO has also been stuck in there. More more on that, see this post.

The second paragraph that Honda’s office submitted John noted was parallel to the final chapter of our report, Coordinating Web Standards. (Hmm, I principally wrote that chapter too….)

*Congressional Technology Coordination (as submitted)*

The Committee recognizes the need for the House of Representatives to develop a strategic and coordinated plan that will prepare for the future technology needs of the institution. A 2006 report commissioned by the Chief Administrative Officer and the Committee on House Administration, entitled /Strategic Technology Road Map for the Ten Year Vision of Technology in the House of Representatives/ provided a suggested structure for an IT evaluation and decision-making process.
No later than 90 days after the enactment of this Act, the Committee requests that the Chief Administrative Officer, the Clerk, and the Sergeant at Arms report to the Committee of their efforts to develop House-wide data-sharing standards; implement standard legislative document formats; address the increasing resource challenges of Member offices; and identify disparate systems throughout the institution, which prevent it from taking advantage of economies of scale.

This is of course fantastic news for anyone that supports transparency, which is, well, everyone in their right mind, I think. So thanks to Congressman Honda for taking the initiative on this!

(Other links: last year’s leg branch appropriations blog post, my first or one of my first posts here about structured data)

Happy 4th of July. I thought I’d share an interesting website that has nothing to do with government transparency but is about good use of government data. The USDA maintains a big database of nutrition facts about foods. You can download the database and build applications based on it, like a menu planner. This is something I’ve been thinking about in the back of my head for a while since after getting into the whole Michael Pollan food mind-set I’ve wondered whether one can make a healthy diet just by balancing various food groups (as I try to do with limited success), or whether (contra Pollan’s overall message, though maybe not in the details) it would be useful to start adding up the numbers of various nutrients to see how my meals match up with recommended values. How should I know, for instance, if I’ve managed to exclude an important vitamin in my particular selection of foods that I eat week after week, right?

The database is great itself, but the cooler website is MyPyramid Menu Planner (mypyramidtracker.gov) (also out of the USDA). You can enter a typical daily roster of what you eat (with a nice sound effect) and it will tell you how it stacks up for a recommended diet for your age (or for me, how to gain weight to a recommended amount for my age). It feels a little over-simplified, but the simplicity keeps me on the site. I find, not surprisingly, that I probably eat about half of the recommended calories and clearly not enough grain or fruit. Well, I knew this in the abstract, but quantifying it helps direct me to fixing the problem.

I’m sure there are other websites that do similar things, but it’s nice to find a case where the government has both published a comprehensive (well structured, well documented) database and has also built a really nice interface for the data. And on a topic that is really very important to daily life, too.

And with that, I think I will take the rest of the weekend off from civics!

CMF published an interim report Communicating with Congress: Recommendations for Improving the Democratic Dialogue . I had one of those “someone got it right” moments reading the report. Following what seemed to be tireless work by Daniel Bennett and Rob Pierson (Rep. Mike Honda’s office) and CMF staff going back a long time, and a conference in October that I really enjoyed, they recommend adding metadata to constituent communication to reliably indicate who the sender is, what the issue is, and what advocacy organization helped the sender send the message.

The recommendation serves to help congressional staff manage incoming communication. It’s a method of triage on the one hand, and a tool to help tally communications by position on the other. Critical as this may be, I find tallying to be incredibly superficial — and it really reveals, I think, that the world of communicating with Congress has become extremely narrow. (But I’ve written on that before.)

I was very lucky this week to have stumbled into the middle of an update being done to a page maintained by the U.S.’s GSA at webcontent.gov on best practices for making data available, for executive branch agencies. The site serves as a collection of best practices and uses OMB policies
as a starting point. I think it had been last updated in 2005.

The page updated is here.

The updates were a combination of suggestions from Scott Horvath and Jeremy Fee at the USGS, Kol Peterson from EPA, and me, and really big thanks go to Scott and Kol for reaching out to others for input on Monday and getting the feedback back to Bev Godwin at GSA who runs webcontent.gov who published the changes only a few days later. Scott also notes that additional suggestions could still be considered (his email address is at the bottom of that page).

In making my suggestions, I turned to the Open Government Data Principles and tried to squeeze in as much as I could without overloading the document, and I drew from ideas that came up in the preparation of the Open House Project report. Some of the changes made were:

• It now provides examples of data as being documents, audio/visual recordings, and databases.
• It now says to support “the widest practical range of public uses of
  the data”. It had formerly suggested supporting the “intended” use of
  the website by visitors.
• It notes the benefit of providing data: “New uses of your agency’s
  data may become a valuable public resource that would be out of the
  scope of your own website, such as helping to keep the public informed
  about the work of your agency and supporting civic education and
  participation.”
• There is a new paragraph that I might be misunderstanding but which
  seems to make a suggestion along the lines of the recent “Invisible
  Hand” paper about the agency’s website getting the data the same way the
  public does: “Providing a uniform method to access raw data can also be
  the first step in internal development, accomplishing both goals at
  once. When a uniform method to access data is available, developers and
  web–services can focus on data presentation.”
• It notes that the availability of bulk downloads of data is something
  to consider when building data access.
• It notes some disadvantages of using proprietary formats.
• It recommends that if a proprietary format is needed, a
  non-proprietary format should be used in addition.
• It adds a benchmark to test for success: “One benchmark for
  determining whether data is made sufficiently available is whether the
  public has all of the data needed to replicate any searching, sorting,
  and display functionality provided on the agency’s own website.”
• It notes that consulting the public in the development of data access
  seems to be entailed from OMB policy: “When choosing data formats and
  distribution methods, keep in mind that your agency’s visitors are the
  best judges of their own needs. Agencies must “establish and maintain
  communications with members of the public and with State and local
  governments to ensure your agency creates information dissemination
  products meeting their respective needs” (OMB Policies for Federal
  Public Websites #4A).”

We have a real success story here.

The guys over at Princeton’s new Center for Information Technology Policy wrote a really great paper for the Yale Journal of Law & Technology on the role data should have, compared to websites, in government. It articulates a point that I think many of us subconsciously have had in mind:

“The new administration should specify that the federal government’s primary objective as an online publisher is to provide data that is easy for others to reuse, rather than to help citizens use the data in one particular way or another.”

And they suggest an interesting way to push that forward:

“The policy route to realizing this principle is to require that federal government websites retrieve the underlying data using the same infrastructure that they have made available to the public. Such a rule incentivizes government bodies to keep this infrastructure in good working order, and ensures that private parties will have no less an opportunity to use public data than the government itself does. The rule prevents the situation, sadly typical of government websites today, in which governmental interest in presenting data in a particular fashion distracts from, and thereby impedes, the provision of data to users for their own purposes.”

I think this is a worthwhile addition to the opengovdata and publicmarkup.org policy documents — if not as a direct recommendation (because I think it may be too much to ask for in a grand form) then noted as a long-term goal or (in terms of the second paragraph I quoted) as a benchmark, a concrete way to tell whether data is open.

The full citation is: Robinson, David, Yu, Harlan, Zeller, William P and Felten, Edward W, “Government Data and the Invisible Hand” (2008). Yale Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 11, 2008

I’ll put the moral of this story up front: data is nice, but the problem is the media.

Today is the primary election in Pennsylvania, and I intend to go over to vote in a few minutes. But it occurred to me only this morning that more things may be on the ballot than the presidential nominees. To be a good citizen, I realized I had better read up on what else I will be voting on before strolling across the street to cast my ballot.

So what else is on the ballot? I figured the PA state website might have that information. Hah. I should only be so lucky. Googling I found CNN’s page only has presidential information; I found an AP article that mentions other candidates; and eventually some five pages of Google hits later I find that the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania seem to be the only group that has put this information online. Thanks to the LWV!

Fortunately some of the ballots are easy. The primary for the House and State Senate are uncontested in each party, and it looks like only one party even has a candidate for State House. (Lucky us.) I’m supposed to vote for state attorney general, auditor general, and treasurer. Each party has one candidate for the first two— another easy “choice.” (I presume these are all primaries and not actual elections for these offices, but the page doesn’t say.)

Then as I look down I find myself completely baffled. I’m supposed to elect pledged delegates to my party’s national convention?? Exactly what am I doing when I vote for either Clinton or Obama if I also have to choose delegates? (Ok, I just read an article in the Philly Inquirer explaining it.)

So I tell you, it’s just ridiculous that I don’t already know this information, and that there is no comprehensive explanation of what is going on on the ballot (although the LWV come close).

Last night I attended an Obama campaign tech-policy panel discussion here at Penn. Unfortunately the consensus among me and my CITP friends who attended was that the event was almost completely uninformative on tech issues. One thing I did learn was that the Obama campaign is making use of some 1500 experts in the public to draft policy. That’s a refreshing idea. In the OHP report, I wrote the last chapter urging Congress to bring the public into their decision making process about using technology for transparency. In January, at dinner during the CITP’s cloud workshop, John Wonderlich and I and others were talking and a (to them crazy, to me interesting) idea came out about creating shadow congressional committees filled with experts/delegates from the public, rather than politicians.

Apparently this failure to reach out to experts and the public extends to the executive branch as well. Says an anonymous (but knowledgeable) writer, “it is widely-accepted that the federal government’s attempt to use the internet for regulations commenting (Regulations.gov) has been a failure.”

This seems to me to underlie some of the larger problems we face. The distrust of politicians created by, for instance, pay-for-access is about the fact that politicians aren’t turning to the right experts for advice. When Ted Stevens is mocked for his understanding of the Internet (though I say that a series of tubes is remarkably accurate), it’s because he clearly failed to talk to an expert.

There’s a structural problem here. Why don’t decision makers seek public input? What can we do in the public to make talking to us more appealing?

Could it be any easier for Congress to enact some pretty ideal transparency legislation now? Last year I lamented on how the ethics reform bill (that Obama now touts as one of his best achievements) was a laundry list of updates to existing rules with only a few actual nuggets of real transparency reform. Well, if they want real reform, Sunlight is serving it to them on a platter at publicmarkup.org, as John noted last post. Modulo a few small modifications that have been suggested, there is really no reason anyone should oppose the bill. (IIRC and IMO, the most controversial section is about making CRS reports publicly available. I personally don’t feel so strongly about that section and can see why some would oppose it.)

While we were drafting the Open House Project report a year ago, it seemed like a good next step would be to just write the legislation that would achieve what we wanted changed — and see if we could get it introduced like other advocacy and industry groups seem to be able to do. I’m glad Sunlight took the time to formulate those recommendations (and more) into their proposed bill.

One of the most interesting sections in Sunlight’s bill is the incorporation of the 8 Principles of Open Government Data (www.opengovdata.org) drafted at a conference in December. Rather than including in each provision or specifying explicitly how data should be made available (although some provisions are explicit, inconsistently), the bill would require the GAO to annually assess the implementations of each provision of the bill according to the principles (section 901). It’s an interesting choice to put the principles in an assessment rather than a requirement (and thinking back, I can remember this type of idea coming up in some of John’s posts). An assessment can keep up with the times, and can place ongoing pressure after initial compliance has been reached. It does seem to allow new data to avoid the principles, though. Could the principles be both mandated and audited? Are the principles specific enough to mandate? (Could we make them specific enough?)

Let me give you two headlines, and you can tell me your reaction to each:

A) Big Oil Finances the Republican Party
B) Congressional Votes Correlated with Big Oil Contributions

From the headlines you’d think the articles are about two separate facts about the world. That is, that the two facts are independent. One can read the first article and then still be surprised after reading through the second article. A friend of mine says about the second hypothetical headline, “I think the votes are sort of taking it to the next step of association.” Compare those with these headlines:

A) Factory Emissions Tied to Deadly Cancer
B) Life Expectancy Lower in Factory Towns

Here you’d say the articles are about the same thing: clearly, because more deadly cancer means more deaths, and that means lower life expectancy. If everyone already knew (A) from an expose last year, when a newspaper reports (B) we say what an idiot the reporter must have been — he just reported the same thing again.

That’s what’s happening with money-and-votes analyses. The facts are more complicated, and the results are less clear, so it’s easy to overlook the problem here. But the problem is here.

We all already know that Big Oil gives more to Republicans than to Democrats. If you didn’t know, you know now. It’s an interesting point; no qualms there. Since the Republicans support big business and the Democrats support the environment (whatever, you get the idea), it makes sense. Fine.

But because of that, I know immediately that any vote related to Big Oil is likely to go down with an uneven distribution of money coming from Big Oil between Yes votes and No votes. In fact, it has nothing at all to do with Republicans and Democrats having different views on oil in particular. It’s just that Republicans and Democrats either all vote together (on naming post offices) or vote against each other (on everything else). The votes where everyone agrees are not relevant here: you can’t have an uneven distribution of money between Yes and No votes when there aren’t No votes to begin with. Since the relevant votes are almost always split on party lines, of course there is going to be a correlation between money and votes.

What I mean by of course is that no one should be surprised to learn about a big correlation between money and votes if it has already been established that there is a correlation with contributions to a particular party. Finding out the magnitude, in dollars, of the correlation doesn’t change anything. It might as well be reported as “Big Oil Gives $XXX more to Republicans than to Democrats.” This headline is less exciting, but it’s the same thing. Throwing in votes just makes it sound more important, and it is misleading because it makes it sound like there is something new and nonobvious to be learned.

Let’s look at what is being reported. I paraphrase from Follow the Oil Money (sorry guys):

Of the 25 Representatives who took the most Big Oil money per term between 2000 and 2007 Representatives, 23 were Republicans. Of the 25 Representatives who took the least amount of Big Oil money per term between 2000 and 2007, 22 were Democrats. … Representatives who voted against clean energy proposals took more than 4.5 times more oil money than those who voted in the public interest.

Why not just say “Republicans” took more than 4.5 times more oil money than “Democrats”? (Well, the number may change a bit of course, but that’s the idea.) The votes have nothing to do with it unless it is showed that the votes were something other than decided roughly on party lines. It’s another question entirely whether the money influenced the votes, or whether votes influence future contributions — a question that is unsolved.

I raised a similar issue previously with some numbers from MAPLight. To paraphrase their analysis and interjecting my own totals:

Opponents of H.R. 1424 gave an average of $22,479 to Republicans and $12,646 to Democrats. These industry groups gave an average of $22,693 to legislators who voted No on this bill, compared to $14,183 to legislators who voted Yes.

Can you guess what happened? It’s no accident that $22,479 is close to $22,693 and $12,646 is close to $14,183. The Republicans predominantly voted No and the Democrats predominantly voted Yes. Actually the vote wasn’t exactly evenly split, which makes the results more interesting. You can still see an effect of money on the vote beyond the party difference, as I noted in that post, but it’s a much smaller correlation.