Recrafting Government As an Open Platform

itjoblog writes "How effective are the world's governments at using technology to become more responsive? Technology has revolutionised the way that we do business, but the public sector has traditionally moved more cautiously than the private one. Now, a report from the Centre for Technology Policy Research in the UK has made some recommendations for the use of technology as an enabling mechanism for government." I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a wiki with full history.

Likely the best websites from the US Government...

[Pojut]

...are the Library of Congress [loc.gov] site and the Supreme Court [supremecourt.gov] site. Both of them are extremely informative, and have a massive wealth of information that is readily available.

Government Transparency

[solevita]

See also government transparency: http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/government-transparency/ [hmg.gov.uk]

Including Open Source Software and Open Document Standards.

It's already all there.

[Anonymous Coward]

There problem with most laws isn't that the information isn't publicly available. If you're Google-Fu skill is high enough, you can generally find any non-classified information that you want. The information is already out in the open.

The problem with most laws is that the information is that it isn't easy to find the damn stuff. A good example was when Baltimore created an ordinance requiring non-abortion providing clinics to post signs saying that they didn't provide abortions. You could find a ton of references to the ordinance, but not the actual ordinance itself. It turned out that the ordinance was buried under a poorly (imho) made city website with a non-searchable PDF, but unless you already knew where to look, chances are you would never find it.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[dkleinsc]

No, there's a much easier answer, that's more inherent in the job: you're dealing with (among other things) the allocation of a significant amount of cash. When you have a significant amount of cash to distribute, most people will try to get as big a share of that pile of cash as they can muster, and one way they'll do that is to butter up the people who are making the decision about how to distribute the cash.

And the next step, of course, is that too many people try to butter up the actual decisionmaker, so a new set of people comes up who's job it is to decide who can butter up the decisionmaker, and they now get buttered up by the people who want extra cash.

This is not limited to government - corporate purchasing departments and the like are also get caught up in this.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[eln]

The necessary and proper clause just says they get to make laws deemed necessary to carry out their various duties as outlined in the Constitution. Every Congressional bill is implicitly backed by the necessary and proper clause because it's the only thing that gives them the ability to pass laws at all. However, in order to be Constitutional the law they pass has to be necessary and proper to carry out one of their enumerated Constitutional powers. Regulating interstate commerce is one of their enumerated powers, and happens to be one that's vague enough that you could claim all sorts of things are necessary and proper for carrying it out.

So, a law being backed by the interstate commerce clause means that the Congress has deemed that law "necessary and proper" for carrying out their duty to "regulate interstate commerce".

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[michael_cain]

Personally, I suspect that people should start voting against legislators who vote for bills that are longer than 100 pages. Any bill longer than this should be more than one bill. The only reason to make a bill as long as most of the ones that Congress has been voting on lately is to hide stuff.

Speaking from my experience as a permanent non-partisan staffer for a state legislature, which required that I spend a lot of time with both state and federal bills, statutes and legislative processes, some remarks:

• Some of the bulk is in the nature of bills. A bill may state that "Section 201, subsection 1, is amended to read," followed by the entire 20 pages of subsection 1 with the intended modifications indicated. The bulk of the actual changes may be small — a sentence removed here, three words added there — but clarity and accuracy require including the current statute as well as the changes.
• Some of the bulk is a consequence of the size and complexity of current statute. I'm a BIG fan of simplifying government, but what is, is. What starts out as a modest change in policy becomes enormous in terms of the bill bulk simply because it may touch many other parts of statute. That is, repeat the previous point 20 or 80 times.
• Many legislators are as unhappy as you are as they watch a bill grow to enormous size right before their eyes as staff adds the pieces necessary to keep the overall body of statute consistent.
• Philosophically, the US Constitution makes Congress the primary power within the federal government (the executive branch is charged with "executing" policies set by Congress). There are limits to how much of the policy setting Congress can delegate (probably the most far-reaching Supreme Court decisions ever made were the ones late in the 19th century when the Court ruled that Congress could delegate at least some policy details — rule writing — to executive agencies). Sometimes Congress is simply exercising its prerogative to write a detailed design document instead of a high-level functional spec.
• In many cases, the detailed design is appropriate. Consider the case where statute allows a factory polluting a river to be shut down. Under exactly which conditions can this be done? What pollutants count? Which don't? At what levels? What procedure must the agency follow to implement the shut down? Are there exceptions, say, in the interest of national security? Is there an appeals process? If so, what documentation must be submitted and on what schedule? Absent the detailed Congressional design, the agency and/or the courts are going to make it all up as they go along.
• Splitting a bill into multiple smaller parts is dangerous, in the sense that some parts may pass and others fail. The result can be statute that is incomplete or even worse, contradictory.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[quanticle]

Well, a government can't be too ineffective either. A lot of people forget that the Constitution wasn't the first government of the United States of America. The founders tried an even weaker form of government with the Articles of Confederation. That government was so weak that the newly independent colonies were almost separate countries. The chaos caused by that state of affairs is what prompted them to create the Constitution and lay out a form of government that could move boldly and decisively in times of crisis, but still have the checks and balances of a more deliberative system.