Open Illinois.org

I’m often asked what the point of government transparency is. Sure, it’s nice, but will putting the information out there really help to make government better? Vigilance is the key.

Here’s a transparency road-map as I see it:

1. Research and policy-development: At the Institute we’re constantly looking into new ideas to make government more transparent. We outline those ideas in speeches, media appearances, and newspaper articles. The real meaty stuff is in our policy briefs and Policy Point one-pagers. In fact, Kate just released a new paper on TIFs and the ways in which they tax people without their knowledge and have very little accountability in how they spend it.

2. Members of our Liberty Leaders program learn about the policies from us and find out just how to talk about them with their local decision-makers. We teach them how to “sell” these ideas to their networks so that they can be the leaders for policy changes.

3. Once Liberty Leaders achieve transparency in their cities, counties, townships, school boards, etc., the work isn’t over. Far from it. Now comes the importance of vigilance. Liberty Leaders, journalists, watchdogs and ordinary citizens need to look through the newly-accessible data to identify waste, graft or ways for the government to save money. Maybe your village has signed a contract for concrete that could be supplied less expensively by another vendor–people need to know about that. Or something more nefarious could be happening, like a payoff or favoritism. Whatever it is, write about it on your blog or talk about it with your neighbors. Once the papers pick up the scent of political corruption they’ll leap all over it.

4. Transparency is simpler because of new technologies. PDF files, websites, and inexpensive databases are tech tools that citizens and government can use to open the state. One cool thing that many governments around the country are doing is writing special software (application program interfaces, or APIs) so that regular people can integrate public information into their websites and analyze the data. In fact, the New York Times recently announced a the Congress API, which will permit anyone to collect data daily from the U.S. Congress and organize it however they like. Liberty Leader Jeff Singer recently passed an article on to me about how some people are “crowd-sourcing” the accountability process with the gigantic federal bailout/stimulus packages.

All politics is local, and when people have information they can be effective participants in their government.

Let me know if you have any more ideas, and contact me if you want to become a Liberty Leader. We need you!