Ballooning budget bafflement brings boisterous brands of bits

[This article was originally published in the January 23rd, 2009 issue of the PIM Weekly Report.]
PIM staff has been getting a kick out of the new transparency tack out of Washington, specifically President Barack Obama’s instruction to federal agencies to release more information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). [We've been following new presidential memoranda and executive orders at the marvelous cryptome.org.] “Transparency in government” is the slogan of the week, and we’re seeing quite a few new efforts to put more stuff online. Overall, there’s a sense that legally mandated releases of information will increasingly get automatically fed into independent websites, where people can organize, digest and remark upon these streams of information.

The most fun new example of this new ‘Web 2.0′ trend is littlesis.org, a sort of ‘involuntary Facebook’ for powerful people and organizations (What’s the opposite of ‘Big Brother’? Little Sis, of course!). It just launched in recent weeks, and its developers have already worked out how to automatically chew through FEC reports and federal lobbyist records, populating lots of interlocking Facebook/Wikipedia-style pages. Many Minnesota pols, businesses and fundraising entities are already on LittleSis (check their blog for more info). Check out the entries for Al Franken, Klobuchar for Minnesota 2012, or Vin Weber, to note just a few examples. Anyone can edit it, like Wikipedia, but it requires contributors to precisely cite their sources. WhoRunsGov.com is another similar venture just launched by the Washington Post.

Policymakers are trying to tap into the ability of massive groups of people to generate useful knowledge; this has been dubbed “crowdsourcing.” In various English-speaking countries like Australia, legislative bodies are starting to mandate electronic open-comment periods for legislation, though that’s likely not feasible in a part-time Legislature like ours. [Another popular one has been the Obama's Change.gov 'Citizen's Briefing Book'.]

The Minnesota Senate has just set up a new WordPress-powered website, the Minnesota Senate Budget Discussion, at budgetforum.senate.mn, to gather public wisdom (motto: “Solving the Budget Problem Together”). We hear it’s an amiable effort carried out jointly by the majority and minority caucus staff, and supported by the non-partisan technical staff. [It got a plug in the National Conference of State Legislatures' really cool blog, The Thicket.] There’s hope that ventures like this will help show the public that legislators are responding more directly to their concerns

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3. Staff Says:
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