May 13, 2009

It's a cruel twist of fate that Twitter is down for maintenance during today's roundtable on Tech's Role in Promoting Greater Government Transparency and Accountability given the group of experts on stage, but at least it gives me a reason to spend a little more time here discussing what's taking place at Tech Policy Summit '09 (the more I tweet, the less I blog).

Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident, is hosting the transparency discussion, which features Seattle's CTO Bill Schrier, Sunlight Foundation co-founder and executive director Ellen Miller, O'Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Public.Resource.org president and CEO Carl Malamud.

The push for more open government has been a particularly hot topic since the election of President Obama, and they each shared insights on the best approach to enable transparency. Below are some Twitter-style highlights.

Bill Schrier: Probably the single biggest thing that could help is to convince government that technology is not a cost to be contained, but it's a tool for efficiency and effectiveness. Too often, elected officials squeeze the IT budget down to the basic operational level.

Carl Malamud: Carl shared eight principles for how government data should be available. The principles call for data to be complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary and license-free.

Tim O' Reilly: I don't think you have to persuade the private sector to do things. There is a wealth of entrepreneurial potential locked up in government data warehouses. We have to change the way that innovation happens. Right now, there are a lot of back-door dealings in D.C. about shaping policy.

Craig Newmark: It benefits us all if we have a government that works. People want to be part of something bigger. This is a new civic generation and it's happening.

Ellen Miller: Sunlight Foundation noticed how successful then-D.C. CTO Vivek Kundra (the new federal CIO) was with Apps for Democracy, so we created a similar contest called Apps for America. We got 45 remarkable applications and we started a conversation about how technologists can engage with the data that government is starting to set free.

When asked by Andrew who in Congress "gets it," Ellen named Rep. Mike Honda (who spoke at TPS: Broadband Innovation a couple of days ago).

Tags: Andrew Rasiej, Carl Malmud, Ellen Miller, Personal Democray Forum, Sunlight Foundation, Tech Policy Summit, Tim O'Reilly, transparency