This project was initiated by Institute of Contemporary Development and launched publicly 2 days ago during “Tver economic forum”. It includes information about 1 400 000 federal contracts, about 210 000 contracts of regional governments. Information about more than 260 000 suppliers and 26 000 customers. It’s all based on public open data about russian spending which being disclosed last 3 years by Federal Treasury. We just used this open data to provide all good people of Russia new view on government public spending.

Hier der Link zur Ankündigung, außerdem der Link zur Portalseite. Bislang kann man nur die bereitgestellten Materialien lesen, die Beteiligungsfunktion wird aber vermutlich bald freigeschaltet.

Die Software wurde entwickelt von Frank Behrend von ELIQOS.

Dazu soll eine offene API entwickelt werden, die es erlaubt Finanzinformationen entweder mit allen oder nur einem bestimmten Personenkreis zu teilen um so für mehr Transparenz zu sorgen. Die Macher des Projekts sehen vielfältige Einsatzmöglichkeiten.

Grafik: openbankproject.org / TESOBE.com

So können z.B. Regierungen und öffentliche Verwaltungen diese Schnittstelle Nutzen um Subventionen und andere Staatsausgaben transparenter zu dokumentieren. Empfänger staatlicher Subventionen könnten also verpflichtet werden, direkt Rechenschaft über empfangene Mittel abzulegen. Damit könnte Korruption und Vetternwirtschaft bekämpft werden.

Doch auch für NGO’s bietet sich die Chance durch eine rigorose Öffnung der eigenen Finanzen vertrauen zu schaffen, und so allen Spendern und Unterstützern offenzulegen, was mit ihrem Geld passiert.

Derzeit sucht das Projekt noch nach Kooperationspartnern und bemüht sich zudem um EU-Fördergelder.

Analysis: this government is open to scrutiny:

Knowledge is power, said the politician and philosopher Francis Bacon. Today we live in the information age, and today information can be power too.

How Open Data Applications are Improving Government:

Open data is the big trend these days when people talk about “Government 2.0.” In reality, the open data movement has just begun, with governments finally starting to release dataen massein an effort to promote transparency. While projects likeApps for Democracy have received significant media attention, we are just at the dawn of the government open data app movement.

Tom Steinberg (mysociety.org) to Advise new UK Government on Transparency:

I will chair a new Transparency Board, which will include experts, including perhaps the Government’s greatest critic when it comes to transparency, Tom Steinberg. Based at the heart of government in the Cabinet Office, we’ll be listening to what the public want and making sure they get the information they ask for wherever humanly possible.

The coming data explosion:

One of the key aspects of the emergingInternet of Things- where real-world objects are connected to the Internet – is the massive amount of new data on the Web that will result. As more and more “things” in the world are connected to the Internet, it follows that more data will be uploaded to and downloaded from the cloud. And this is in addition to the burgeoning amount of user-generated content – which has increased 15-fold over the past few years,according toa presentationthatGoogleVP Marissa Mayer made last August at Xerox PARC. Mayer said during her presentation that this “data explosion is bigger than Moore’s law.”

Open data? Fine. But available isn’t accessible:
Technology has become ubiquitous, a potential our society is rather ignoring at the moment. Think about it.
We spend most of our work day in front of a screen, some of our friends never stop to Twitter, most of them check their emails on their blackberry even when drunk, and now we grab the iPad on the weekend in our leisure time. But what does it really mean for our societies to be surrounded by this new digital technology? What chances lie there in being surrounded by computers? This is a question, we barely think about. Not good. At the moment, we can see some serious potential we are about to miss.

Accountability, better services and economic opportunity:
The promise of government accountability, better government services, and new economic opportunity is why we do what we do.

Despite our widespread ability to communicate online; to see, as a society, to the murky bottom of the Gulf in real time, we’re still in a suspended state of irrelevance to this slow motion disaster — transfixed and dazed, as Micah Sifry points out.

Unfortunately, the people formerly known as the audience are fundamentally still functioning as the audience.

This is true, in part, because the current situation is a failure of complex machinery, which is difficult for most of us to constructively relate to. We try, suggesting enormous rubber shower curtains, or pointing out the absorbency of hay. And perhaps the international community of oil rig engineers is collaborating well now — if so, I hope that story gets told.

There is, however, another failure here too, that takes less specialized skill to relate to. That’s the regulatory failure that has led to current situation. We have a complex set of regulatory mechanisms set up to keep this from happening, and they have failed, and miserably so. We’re only really relating to that regulatory failure only through traditional investigative journalism — to its credit, but also at all of our peril.

Every day brings a new kick in the stomach, as the New York Times, McClatchy, and many many others illuminate new parts of this failure.

And each time I read one of those stories, I feel the same way — amazed that it happened, and also amazed that we’re only finding out about it now.

For all of the national discussion about offshore drilling, how has no one reviewed the required plans before now to realize their apparent fakeness? How were federal regulators able to let the industry fill out their own inspection forms, to be later traced in pen?

Many of these “public” inspections, in turns out, were only public in a very limited sense, opening the door to neglect and abuse. The same holds for the plans companies need to submit before they drill — apparently public, but effectively out of reach, and, consequently, filled out thoughtlessly, failing to create accountability. (My initial research into those reports is attached at the the end of this post, and inspired me to write this.)

Many of these public accountability mechanisms rely on outdated techniques despite their central role in our regulatory system. Putting an important report in a regional field office doesn’t make it effectively available for public inspection. As we’ve now seen, it makes them effectively hidden — waiting in obscurity for weeks for real review, even in the face of the country’s largest environmental disaster.

That’s the spirit in which we’ve helped prepare the Public Online Information Act, or POIA, introduced by Rep. Steve Israel in the House — to require public reporting to be truly public, by forcing their publication online.

While the live view of the gushing oil is valuable, creating some accountability, and having what is probably an important psychological impact, we need a live view of the other mechanisms that failed us here too — our public protections in the form of regulations. I’m not talking about cameras on the helmets of oil rig inspectors (although the image is appealing at the moment), but about key public reports going online so that they serve their intended purpose.

These reports aren’t obscure, or pointless either. They’re absolutely central to the way we regulate industry activity, and that’s true across regulatory contexts. The SEC, FCC, FEC (etc) regulatory agencies each collect public information, not as a byproduct of their work, but as a central approach to doing their jobs. Read the Federal Election Campaign Act. Or the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (as I did below) — they’re largely accessible even if you don’t have a law degree — and you can see that these public reports were created as the pillars of public regulation. Public reporting empowers public regulation.

How often are we letting them languish, unread, unexamined, and unchallenged, in the “regional field offices” of our public neglect?

The administration, as they piece together the Interior Department and the Minerals Management Service, should use public scrutiny to everyone’s advantage, and start posting MMS information online — if it’s public, post it. There is probably much, much more to be examined than the recent news stories indicate.

As they retroactively illuminate our regulatory failure, the daily gut check from our newspapers includes phrases like “according to our review of certain MMS documents.” We should, instead, be saying “according to documents submitted yesterday by inspectors,” or, “according to a permit to drill submitted earlier this week by ___, and spotted by ___, a reporter for the Daily ___”.

Mechanical failure is palatable; regulatory failure is inexcusable.

That it takes a national disaster to spur us into effective oversight means we’ve got a long way to go before the public can effectively hold the government, and by extension, regulated industry, to account.

What follows are my notes as I researched the OCS Lands Act, and the reports it creates ineffective public access to:

Here’s a summary of what I found regarding the MMS reports I haven’t been able to find online anywhere yet.

1. The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCS Lands Act) sets policy regarding leasing and drilling.

2. 43 USC 1351 mandates that detailed “Development and Production Plans” (DPPs) be submitted to the Secretary (almost def. the Interior Secretary). I suspect that this detailed report would be immensely valuable to read, especially if one were done of the Deepwater Horizon well. I don’t know whether that well would be covered by the OCS Lands Act, or whether it’s different, although I suspect it’d be covered. Even if the current spill isn’t covered by this requirement, it’s likely that it’d be covered by other similar requirements.

pdf

3. The same law mandates that these reports are available to the public, after appropriate redaction, and within 10 days of receipt. (“online” isn’t mentioned.) Googling for them gets me nowhere.

4. The Regulations promulgated under the OCS Lands Act require that these DPPs be made available to the public at the “MMS Regional Public Information Office”, by the Regional Supervisor.

30 CFR 250.204 (PDF )

5. The MMS site says that these required reports will also be called a Development Operations Coordination Document, or DOCD.

6. Googling for DOCDs and DPPs (the two names for the same required report) hasn’t been productive.

7. There are numerous other reports on the MMS site that could conceivably be some sort of excerpts of the DOCDs or DPPs, but they appear to be something else.

8. Guidance from MMS on how to prepare and submit those documents:

9. MMS’s information page (The DPPs don’t appear to be here either.)

The Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account. We also recognise that this will help to deliver better value for money in public spending, and help us achieve our aim of cutting the record deficit. Setting government data free will bring significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites.

To achieve this aim, they want to take the following actions:

• We will require anyone paid more than the Prime Minister in the centrally funded public sector to have their salary signed off by the Treasury.
• We will regulate lobbying through introducing a statutory register of lobbyists and ensuring greater transparency.
• We will also pursue a detailed agreement on limiting donations and reforming party funding in order to remove big money from politics.
• We will strengthen the powers of Select Committees to scrutinise major public appointments.
• We will introduce new protections for whistleblowers in the public sector.
• We will take steps to open up government procurement and reduce costs; and we will publish government ICT contracts online.
• We will create a level playing field for open-source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.
• We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.
• We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.
• We will require all councils to publish meeting minutes and local service and performance data.
• We will require all councils to publish items of spending above £500, and to publish contracts and tender documents in full.
• We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.

This sounds pretty nice for the beginning, let’s see if they keep the promise.

Clay Johnson briefly runs through some of the more notable entries from the ‘Apps for America II’ development contest, all of which utilize information exclusively from Data.gov.

Among the awards offered was a $2500 prize for visualization, which aimed to encourage involvement from the artistic community. The winner of this prize, the Quakespotter Desktop app operates in conjunction with Google Earth and Twitter.com to match the location of an earthquake with mentions of the same earthquake on Twitter.

Johnson argues that this effort shows how over 1000 developers can make helpful, creative and retail use of the data collected wholesale by governments.  Additional entries he highlights include usaspending.gov, flyontime.us, thisweknow.org and datamasher.org.

More about the Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge here.

This is a good moment to mention the upcoming next gov2.0 expo from 25. to 27 May 2010 in Washington DC, USA. See the full program here. Here is a preview of the panels Clay will be involved in:
Truly Open Data

Truly Open Data means going beyond putting a CSV file on the Internet. It means being responsible for what you put out in ways that government isn’t used to doing – and it means developing new lines of communications with the public. This workshop will give examples of how to publish data, how to maintain it, and how to handle it when things go wrong. Read more.
Sunlight Foundation Contest Winners

Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs, will be announcing winners from the Sunlight Foundation’s newest contest. Previous contests, Apps for America and Apps for America the Data.gov edition, have spurred a community of “hactivists” or civically-minded technologists to show off what they can do for their country. Read more.

The Business of Being Open

What is the future of technology, open data, and citizen collaboration? How does enterprise view its role in the open government community and within government? Hear from IBM, Adobe, and Microsoft about how each company works with local and federal governments, building a sustainable network, as well as the business of facilitating open government. Read more.

Regarding the Gov 2.0 Recommendations 6.3-6.6, which state that Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) should be the default licence for PSI, the report provides “agreement in principle,” undertaking that the IP Guidelines will not “impede the default open licensing position proposed in recommendation 6.3.”

Since then, Australia has released three major government publications under Creative Commons licenses, the latest being theirnational budget under CC BY.

In fact, the last week has seen the release of three major Federal Government reports – the Budget, the Gov 2.0 response and the NBN Implementation Study – all under CC licences. This seems to be a great indicator that the government really means what it says – open access is going to be the default position for the Australian Federal Government from now on.

This marks an exciting time for the Australian government, as they move towards fulfilling their commitment to openness. For more information, see CC Australia’s post on the matter.

Dieser Artikel ist zuerst erschienen im Creative Commons Weblog, die Autorin ist Jane Park. Der Artikel steht unter Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Am 21. Mai werden Hans Rosling, bekannt durch sein Daten-Visualisierung via Gapminder, sowie Beth Noveck, ‘United States Deuputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government’, in einer per Webcast übertragenen Sitzung ihre Ideen zur Nutzung der Daten präsentieren.

Mittlerweile hat die Weltbank auch eine „Apps Challenge“ angekündigt. Sie will dazu aufrufen, „innovative Anwendungen für Entwicklung“ mit den neu veröffentlichen Datensätzen zu programmieren. Alem Walji, Verantwortlicher für die Weltbank Open Data Initiative kommentierte:

„Bürger werden in der Lage sein aus Datensätzen neue Applikationen zu entwickeln, um dabei zu helfen Entwicklungsprobleme wie Kindersterblichkeit, Alphabetisierung und extreme Armut zu lösen.“ [eigene Übersetzung]

Außerdem wurde eine iPhone App (Data Finder) für die Weltbank Daten bereit gestellt. Zur Zeit kann damit nur ein Teil des Datenbestandes abgerufen werden, die verfügbaren Daten sollen allerdings mit der Zeit erweitert werden.