Exile on Jones Street

This morning, I’m pleased to announce that as part of the spiffying up of the General Assembly’s Web site, they’ve added a set of RSS feeds. There is no reason all state agencies can’t follow suit and many plan to. It may not seem like a large leap, but in terms of expanding the civic space online it is.
Once an agency has added a feed the choice of content becomes important. Tapping the already established flow of releases out of the press office is likely to be the main source for the feeds, but that doesn’t get us much deeper in the process and it’s often the highly-filtered view. To add richness to the feeds, the flow of reports, studies and analysis should also be available. The new General Assembly feeds are a good start.
Following is the first of two parts of an article I’ve been working on. Seems like as good a time as any to send it on.

Can RSS (or something like it) save government? (Part 1)

Lofty, presumptive title, I know. So settle in—this will take a sec.

One afternoon last fall, between 3:43 and 3:50 p.m., I received three e-mails from the State Auditor’s Office saying that three new audits had been completed and were available online. The emails included the title, subject, type of audit and whether there were “findings,” usually an indication of crimes, rules violations or something significant.

These particular audits outlined concerns about procedures at three county clerk of court offices. While I greatly appreciated knowing about those audits, it was not not a big statewide story. But had I any dealings with any of those clerk of courts offices, I would be immensely interested in finding out about the audits.

What makes me even more grateful for the information is that the auditor’s office made it so easy to get on the list. I just signed up online. This is rare in the state bureaucracy, where despite open records and open meetings laws, information is pretty tightly held. With many departments, in order to get on a mailing list like that, I’d have to send a written request asking to be on the list, often following that up with a phone call. Even then, though, you have to work to keep up with agendas, reports, staff changes and the general flow of business. This, of course, presumes you’ll be made aware of every report or change, even if the administration doesn’t like what it says.

As a result of this system, reporters and interested parties have to constantly check Web sites for details, especially if you want to get the information out in a timely manner. The auditor reports I downloaded were winging their way by snail mail to the local papers where someone will dutifully retype in a quote or two. Those stories should be coming out any. . .day. . .now.

I don’t mean to deride print journalism in the early 21st Century, it’s having a hard enough time. And, most papers are slowly adjusting. My complaint is with state and local governments that don’t get it. They rely on an out-of-date, heirarchal system of information distribution, overlooking governments’ responsibility to provide for a free flow of information. Instead, local governments, which often spend significant time and money trying to inform the general public about large projects, have by and large failed miserably to keep up with the nuts and bolts of public information online.

While I’ll admit that during my beat reporter days I enjoyed getting at a new document first, there was time and volition (as in it was my job) to do it. For most people who aren’t covering town hall for a living, their need for government information usually stems from change at a local level—new regulations, street repairs, growth and transportation and so on. Another significant group are those citizens engaged in some form of advocacy or political activity. Both groups rely on the ability to drill deeper for information to get, often in real terms, to street level. In general, though, they still take their initial clues from the media at a time when coverage, especially at that ground level, is shrinking and major media outlets are consolidating and homogenizing.

This is changing, though, and I would argue for the better, as more people learn to find, digest and disseminate public information. But governments need to cooperate in this endeavor and recognize that greater access means greater engagement by citizens means better democracy. In too many ways we are headed in the opposite direction. To save us from this spiral of disengagement, I suggest that government be tagged and fed.

Tagging my hood

Let’s say you live in Smith City in a little suburb called Meadow (named, of course, on what it replaced). You like it in Meadow, but don’t know (yet) that there’s a Mega-Mart being planned for Meadow Downs Shopping Center. You don’t know this because you don’t live in a contiguous property or within 1,000 feet of the Mega-Mart site. You live 1,005 feet away. Sorry, years ago, when information was based on mailings and the town was much smaller, the town councilors decided that 1,000 feet sounded about right.

Fortunately, your neighbor is obsessed with growth in your area and keeps tabs on it by tracking and assortment of Smith City tags as well as keeping up with the sites of Smith City bloggers. She just got pinged that the town is reviewing a site plan for the new shopping center. She hasn’t even opened the document and already knows there’s a Mega-Mart in the project. This is because the clerk in the Smith City public affairs office just posted notice of the meeting with the tags of the three neighborhoods affected along with the words Mega-Mart, stormwater and a couple of others.

In five minutes, your neighbor is on the Meadow neighborhood listserv. Then she surfs over to the Village Smithy, the local politics and stuff blog, where, sure enough, the meeting notice has already hit the RSS feed marked Town Hall (first feed in the column that starts with the Blogad for Mayor Quimby). Smithy, in fact, has already looked over the pdfs of the plans and has a few things to say about it.

As you fire off an e-mail to Mayor Quimby that night reminding him of all the runoff already from Meadow Downs Shopping Center, you’ve got your points down. (Quimby’s already logged on to SmithPolitics and promised a thorough review of the project.) “Thank God my hood’s been tagged,” you say quietly to yourself.