On January 5th I quickly wrote a short post about how then President-Elect Barack Obama uses blist. That post was published just a few minutes after the CHANGE.GOV site first went live with a blist widget. In that post I described why publishing data in a blist widget greatly improves upon a basic HTML table. A few days ago I wrote a post, first published on TechCrunch then later on The Washington Post, about how the Obama Administration uses “web 2.0″ software from innovative companies including Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, twitter and blist to promote The White House’s top three priorities – communication, transparency and participation. The politically astute team at ReadWriteWeb has also been a leader in reporting this transformation taking place in politics, fueled by the Obama team’s adoption of web technology – read: President Elect Obama’s FireWire Chats: Transparency Redefined? and Obama’s Social Media Advantage.
While the previous post was meant to provide a quick sketch of the creative ways that President Obama’s team is using technology to meet all three priorities, I want to go back and dive more deeply into the topic of transparency, an area where blist can continue to add more value to government and the Obama administration.
While Mr. Obama captured 52% of the popular vote, more than 80% of people polled during the inauguration weekend are now supportive and in favor of him. There’s electricity in the air about Obama’s commitment to run the most honest and transparent administration to date.
Disclosure is a foundational pillar of honesty and transparency. The Obama-Biden Transition Team recognized that and voluntarily disclosed the names of their transition project donors. There’s no Federal Election Commission statute or rule that required it. The voluntary nature of this disclosure is in part what makes it remarkable.
Earlier this decade I founded another company, MessageRite, which also had transparency at its core. We offered a service that helped companies archive their corporate email. As we know from Enron, Worldcom and Andersen Consulting, if there’s a smoking gun it’s likely to be found in email. Until that point in time the primary audience for email archiving services were stock brokers. They were mandated by the SEC to archive email and to be ready to reproduce it upon request. When a discovery request came in from the SEC or NASD, the inclination of many Wall Street banks was to print the emails out – literally reams of paper. Why did they do that even though it was actually easier to produce the emails electronically? Because they wanted the emails to be hard to consume, decipher and digest. A mountain of paper was hard to work with. The investment bank met the letter of the law, but they fell far short of the spirit of the law.
Which brings me back to the other point that makes the use of blist widgets by the Obama team so remarkable. If they wanted to project a false sense of transparency they would simply publish the data in HTML tables or as a large PDF instead of using blist. They could justifiably claim “we disclosed the data.” But the forward thinking, web savvy technologists of Mr. Obama’s new media team knew that dealing with data in HTML tables was hard for the recipient. They wanted to not only publish the data, but do so in a way that could be easily and readily consumed by anyone interested in the data. They surveyed their options and chose blist.
On the surface, the differences between an HTML table and a blist widget are subtle. At first glance, maybe a blist widget just seems like a cosmetic upgrade, a pretty face. But it’s much more meaningful than that. By upgrading from an HTML table to a blist widget when disclosing public data, consumers of the data recognized the following benefits:
The data could be easily sorted by any column – donor name, city, state, employer, amount contributed, etc.
The data could be easily searched across every row and every column. Do you want to know if Harrison Ford donated to the transition project? Just search for it.
The data could be easily downloaded. In just one click anyone could copy the entire data set to their hard drive and analyze it to their heart’s content.
The data could be analyzed online. By clicking on the “View Full Screen” link, the consumer of the data would be taken into the data set on the blist site, where you could perform advanced ad hoc queries and even create advanced filters. Do you want to find out who in Seattle contributed more than $1,000? The two screenshots below respectively show blist’s lens builder for building advanced queries and the results of that sample query:
The data could be easily redistributed via email or even republication of the widget. Are you a grass roots political blogger and want to write a blog post about the donor data? Do you want the data table in your post? Just grab the widget embed code and include it in your blog post.
The significance of the Obama-Biden Transition Team choosing blist is more than a customer selecting a vendor. The new face of the Whitehouse.gov site reinforces the Obama Administration’s commitment to using the best technology to achieve their goal of open source democracy. It’s about initiating a new status quo for transparency, focused on empowering the citizens in entirely new ways. It’s the new spirit of openness fostered by the incoming administration. While we at blist are thrilled that the Obama team is using blist, in many ways it disappoints us even more that the majority of other governmental bodies aren’t yet using blist to transparently disclose public data and make it more readily available and consumable.
Where are the Senate and House voting records?
Why isn’t EDGAR data easier to work with?
Where’s the clearinghouse for data about the activities of lobbyists?
Where’s the TARP data?
How will the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act data be published?
blist widgets are the very best way to publish, share, analyze and redistribute public data. The genie has been let out of the bottle. Now that the Obama Team has shown how using blist widgets benefits the consumers of the data, when will the other agencies follow suit? There simply is no better way to share public data than via a blist widget.
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