The Promise & Perils of Transparency is organized by Desiree Butterfield of The University of Maine's Fogler Library.
This hyperblog is a project of Still Water.
Do you think our government should be run like a “fish bowl” with complete transparency or do you think that there should be a ethic or logic to reasoning what information should be disclosed. Where do you fall on the spectrum?
Trust and Truth in Documentary Filmmaking: The Transparent Qualities of The Way We Get
Moderator: Ben Fowlie, founder of the Camden International Film Festival, moderator
Aron Gaudet, Director, Gita Pullapilly, Producer, and cast members of The Way We Get By
Please post your questions by replying to this thread.
Moderator: Irwin Gratz, MPBN
Carolyn Ball, Ph.D., Public Administration, University of Maine
Amy Fried, Ph.D., Political Science, University of Maine
Joline Blais, Ph.D., New Media, University of Maine
Jon Ippolito, M.F.A., New Media, University of Maine
Please post questions for this panel by replying to this thread.
Our speaker will be Jim Campbell, Board Member of the Maine Freedom of Information Coalition and
Chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee, Maine Library Association. Campbell is also host of “Notes from the Electronic Cottage,” a program that deals with information technology and its effects on our everyday lives. If you have questions, please reply to this post and we will share them with Jim.
Jim’s claim that the Maine state Web site exposes social security numbers is scary. Again, it seems like a key issue regarding transparency is whether the information being disclosed is by the powerful about the powerless or vice versa.
QUESTION FROM JOLINE BLAIS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF NEW MEDIA: Who is using information in Maine and what meanings are being constructed? Where do we need to go? Trends? Issues?
Jim Campbell:
-“One of the biggest issues emerging in the state is the balance point between access to information and privacy… It’s a very difficult problem.”
-Identity theft is big issue.
-The Maine Freedom of Access law has so many more exemptions than you can imagine. The federal FOIA law only has 9. The state law focuses on particulars.
-Aggregation has complicated the balance between privacy and access.
If you would like to see how the Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project rated Maine’s FOIA laws, you can visit the site by clicking here.
Sometimes we forget just how much information is out there in the world….I am a historian and sometimes I examine old books from various libraries….every so often I come across an old book with names and social security numbers listed in the back. Not that long ago, one’s library ID number (social security number) was written on a physical card for records purposes. When the book was returned the card was placed back in the book.
Meeting the Mandate: National and Statewide Perspectives
Our moderator will be Mark Woodward, former Editor-in-Chief, Bangor Daily News
Panelists:
Amanda Wood, Director of Governmental Affairs, the office of U.S. Senator Susan Collins
Kelly Hokkanen, General Manager, InforME, a partner of Maine.gov
Tarren Bragdon, Chief Executive Officer, The Maine Heritage Policy Center
Reply to this post with questions for our panelists.
Kelly Hokkanen is the General Manager of InforMe, the public-private partnership entity operating the award-winning website of the State of Maine, Maine.gov.
Hokkanen says that there are many steps in Transparency… Putting information online is a first step. Maine.gov has over 300,000 pages of content with over 15 million hits per month.
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Maine.gov is self funded?
Hokkanen says “yes” that they may for example receive an agent fee for issuing a hunting license. This fee can go towards funding the site. Statutory fees can also be used to cover expenses. There is an oversight board to make sure InforMe has sufficient funding and the funding model is adequate to fund the service over time. “We don’t receive any appropriations.”
QUESTION: How do you measure your cost effectiveness?
Hokkanen: There are a lot of ways we accomplish oversight: 1) Our board makes sure our fees and levels of service are appropriate. We contract with an Augusta company to provide the service; 2) We look at return on investment for agencies.
Amanda Wood currently serves as Director of Governmental Affairs on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for Ranking Member, the Honorable Susan M. Collins (R-ME). She supervises federal agency oversight including programs at the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management.
Tarren R. Bragdon served for five years as the Director of Health Reform Initiatives prior to becoming CEO of the Maine Heritage Policy Center in 2008. He is also a graduate of the University of Maine.
Want to know how much a Maine public employee makes? You can find that at maineopengov.org
One of my students created a Web site meant to expose these data more publicly, particularly about professors’ salaries at UMaine. But most of the buzz after his launch centered on the hockey coach’s salary 🙂
Question for Tarren: You just stated that you fundraise for your $1 million budget in order to help disclose money trails and payroll. Do you self-disclose this data? Do you provide information especially on who funds Maine Heritage Policy Center and who most uses the data? And what ‘meaning’ might be derived from this data? I’d be curious about this for InfoME as well.
Mark Woodward asks panelists where most of the traffic is on their sites.
Hokkanen says on Maine.gov the state agency directory is consistently a top hit. The weather is also very popular, as is job information. As far as online services: renewing your vehicle registration, the sex offender search, hunting and fishing licenses, etc. Citizen services are popular, but business services are heavily used.
Bragdon says that on maineopengov.org payroll information is most popular. Bragdon says that search capacity and database limitations prevent site users from knowing they can search for individual people within the records. The Maine Heritage Policy Center has created a blog to help users understand what kind of information is available.
COMMENT FROM GEORGE MARKOWSKY: He says he is trying to sensitize his students to the fact they have social responsibilities. “In the future transparency will involve many technical challenges and it’s important the new crop of students understand these responsibilities.”
QUESTION FROM VIRGINIA NEES HATLEN, ASSOCIATE DEAN OF THE UMO COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES
Bragdon: We maintain a data set on how much government spends to companies. There is an independent group that also maintains this data. This allows users to compare data sets. It requires a sophisticated tool to allow users to perform searches. For us, it is a $100K project that has only been technologically possible in the last 18 months. It’s up to the users to create the information, we just want to give them a tool to extract that information beyond a tabular search.
Cary Coglianese, Ph.D., Deputy Dean and Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania Law School, is delivering the keynote address. Post your questions and we can pass them on to Dr. Coglianese during the Q&A session.
If you would like to check out the site Dr. Coglianese mentioned, transparency-gov.com, here’s the link: http://www.transparent-gov.com/Pages/default.aspx
Want to read more about government transparency reports? Here are some links: http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=government+transparency+reports
To see the original documents that Dr. Coglianese is discussing:
Reno’s Memo on FOIA (Link)
http://www.justice.gov/oip/foia_updates/Vol_XIV_3/page3.htm
Ashcroft’s Memo on FOIA (PDF)
http://www.doi.gov/foia/foia.pdf
Holder’s Memo on FOIA (PDF)
http://www.justice.gov/ag/foia-memo-march2009.pdf
To see a complete list of documents related to FOIA (maintained by the National Security Archive at George Washing University): http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/foia/govfoia.html
The suggestion for moving towards a reasoned transparency is an interesting one. I was wondering to what extent or in what way Mr. Coglianese believes this would be expressed. Would agencies start writing Supreme Court like decisions for every regulation? Or would it just be a memo outlining the highlights?
We currently have reasoned transparency (The Administrative Procedures Act of 1946) allowing for review under the arbitrary and capricious standard. The courts can reject the agency’s rule in order to provide an incentive for reasoned transparency. The preamble in Federal Agency documents is the place where the agency can explain its rationale for the rule.
Where does wikileaks fit into this picture?
MacKenzie, WikiLeaks is a great contemporary example.
http://wikileaks.org/
So the framing of transparency as the expanded release of information is too narrow. If we are going to talk about moving towards a more transparent and functional democracy, shouldn’t we be expanding the conversation to discuss better funding of public schools, the proposed cuts of the corporation for public broadcasting, and other issues that deal with real ways of fostering an informed and engaged public? How is the public to question or measure the reason behind ‘reasoned transparency’?
Excellent question. This is related to the “conflicts of interest” thread below that Martin started.
Coglianese on WikiLeaks: “I don’t know if the official trumpeting of transparency is needed when we have this robust culture of transparency as WikiLeaks has demonstrated.”
Do you believe that there are places where transparency already has gone too far? And other than the damage to the President’s popularity has there been any documentation of damages to decision making or is it just a logical conclusion or sense?
The Administration’s Press Censorship
Published: September 17, 2010
The New York Times
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: University of Maine History Professor Howard Segal would like Dr. Coglianese to discuss the term “transparency” in general. He would also like to know specifically about the connections between transparency and American voter participation.
The term ‘transparency” has been used in Europe for a long time. I think the US is just starting to use the term, although the concept of transparency is clear in the Constitution. (no pun intended)
Coglianese
Concerns about transparency can be traced all the way back to the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act….. The Federal Register Act passed 75 years ago…
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: To what degree are FOIA requests being used politically? To what degree has transparency been examined to see if FOIA requests can be a “political sledge hammer” that discourages the openness that the government is trying to promote?
There are some limits that should be placed on transparency… some preference for secrecy in government communications with regulatory industry that sounds like regulatory capture, but it is an example of how we might carve out a space where the “fishbowl” is a little bit obscured but we can counteract the risk of regulatory capture in those cases by demanding better reasoned transparency.
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: University of Maine Computer Science Professor George Markowsky makes a point about IBM data and efficacy of storing certain types of materials.
The Cohen Forum is under way. Joyce Rumery, Dean of University Libraries, is welcoming participants. If you’re participating electronically, please introduce yourself and let us know why this topic is of interest to you in your professional life.
Mike Hastings, the Director of Research and Sponsored Programs, welcomes the keynote speaker, Dr. Cary Coglianese. You can read more about Branzburg v. Hayes at the First Amendment Center’s website: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/faclibrary/case.aspx?id=865
and 2 others are discussing.
sunny_hughes 7:24 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink |
Carolyn showed a video that related to buzzwords in transparency. You can watch it again on YouTube.