In the ten weeks since I co-founded the Superdelegate Transparency Project, I've learned quite a bit. I've learned that there are people from all walks of life who are willing to put in the dint of hard work to contribute to the democratic process. I've learned that a lot of state party offices are understaffed. And I've learned that PDF files are the bane of transparency.
At STP, a number of citizen journalists have labored to build transparency tool that shows superdelegates and how their endorsements match up against how their constituents voted. It never has been about trying to persuade the superdelegates to take a strictly populist approach to their role at the Democratic Convention; but it has sought to create information that isn't otherwise available.
By far, one of the most tedious tasks has been entering vote totals by congressional district. And here I will mention that STP owes a great thanks to the folks that run TheGreenPapers.com who have been been doing their part for transparency since long before STP came on the scene. Without TheGreenPapers, the tedious job of getting election results into the wiki would have been compounded with such tedious tasks as manually transferring data from PDF files (no copy and paste).
I have personally copy-jockeyed election results into the wiki for about 25 states and one thought has routinely crossed my mind: "Is this any way to run a democracy?"
Clearly the answer to that question is a resounding "No!" While the rest of the virtual world dives head first into Web 2.0 and all that it might mean, accessibility to public information has largely stagnated. Credit should be given to such initiatives as the Open House Project, But anybody who has tried to retrieve legislation, public filings or election returns from a government website knows that all too often such offerings reduce the Internet to a glorified fax machine. Whether it's the dreaded PDF or a text dump into one large and undifferentiated HTML file, virtual paper is no longer good enough.
It's time to digitize this democracy in such a way that bottom-up participation in all aspects of government is possible.
The Sunlight Foundation, a transparency advocacy group based in Washington, recently launched PublicMarkup.org. PublicMarkup is a legislative initiative focused on bringing public information online in a structured, accessible, and consistently usable way. The core of the site is the wiki-esque edition of the Transparency in Government Act 2008 which allows for online participation by anyone. The act is a broad legislative effort aimed at increasing transparency throughout the federal government.
To the extent that it is relevant to federal legislation, I will be proposing the creation and adoption of an XML standard for reporting federal election returns. As I mentioned above, reporting methods vary widely from state to state and I believe it is time for the federal government to get behind a standard structure so that citizens and journalists can have meaningful access to election results.
As an example of what I am talking about. At the Superdelegate Transparency Project, we have had some challenges presenting the New Jersey results in a way that is consistent with the rest of the states. While most states use congressional districts for proportional allocation, New Jersey uses specially created delegate districts. This has had the effect of masking whether house members' superdelegate endorsements are aligned with their constituents. A properly crafted XML spec would make quick work of discovering that information.
I believe we are witnessing the beginnings of a sea-change in how politics works in this country. The campaigns of Howard Dean, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton show the power of bottom-up participation in electoral politics. With the growth of online communities, there is no reason to doubt that crowd-sourcing techniques can be meaningfully applied to the legislative process and ethics oversight. The community-building technologies are there, the citizens are there. But what is lacking the most is meaningful access to information.
PublicMarkup.org will help to address this deficiency. I urge you to visit the site and get involved in the project. Read a section or two of the legislation and share your thoughts. By doing so, not only will you be helping to improve the end result, but you will also be showing our elected officials why such legislation is necessary.