Note: This post originally ran at Congress Matters on June 3rd, and addressed issues of transparency then being discussed at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York.
I don't know if I've done this before, but here's a quick post I'm putting up to clarify a couple of things I sent out on Twitter, aimed specifically at the audience attending the Personal Democracy Forum right now:
First:
Remote #pdf10 note: Transparency comes in 2 flavors: access to data & understanding of it. Understanding is way underfunded.
Second:
Remote #pdf10 note no. 2: Understanding-type transparency leads from data hacking into process hacking, so data can produce change.
What do I mean?
Well, there's a much longer explanation that I'll no doubt get into later, but let me give you a quick example of what happens when you have access/data hacking transparency without understanding/process hacking transparency.
We all watched the other day as the House considered the FY2011 Defense authorization bill, and many of us waited with particular interest for the vote on the amendment offered by Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA-08) repealing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Everyone wanted to see that vote, and everyone wanted to know when it was coming up on the floor.
Well, thanks to our access/data hacking transparency friends, interested watchers and Twitter denizens got a Tweet-cast heads up on exactly that. In fact, the heads up let everyone know that although the vote had been expected the following day, plans were being changed on the fly, right on the House floor, so that the vote would take place just a few hours later. Important news!
Only hardly anyone got it. Or that is, hardly anyone "got" it. Despite the fact that the data went out, it took understanding/process hacking to make sense of it. Observe:
The very transparency-friendly @HouseFloor Twitter feed notified interested parties, thus:
ORDER OF PROCEDURE - Pursuant to section 4 of H. Res. 1404, Mr. Andrews gave notice that amendment numbered 79 may be o http://bit.ly/...
Well, great! Right? Transparency!
Yes and no. It's as transparent as access/data hacking transparency could possibly be, of course. Information made available to the insider-types on the House floor had just been Tweet-cast to everyone with enough interest in getting that information, and it was served up on a silver platter in near real time. The web page maintained by the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives had that information posted and time stamped at 7:12 pm. The @HouseFloor account Tweeted it out at 7:16 pm.
So the interested public was fully informed and on notice, right? No, not at all! And why not? Because the data still had to be run through the understanding/process hacking transparency filter, thus:
RT @HouseFloor: Pursuant to sec 4 of HRes1404, Mr. Andrews gave notice that amendment # 79 may be offered out of order || That's DADT.
The access/data hacking side had used an automated process to dig out the raw, factual information. Mr. Andrews had given notice that amendment numbered 79 might be offered out of order. But it took the understanding/process hacking filter to make the data usable to the average reader. People who had read the rule for consideration of the defense bill (or people who had read about the rule at Congress Matters or some other source) knew that the Murphy amendment had been slated as the 79th amendment of 82 approved for consideration. But where was Murphy's name in the notice? Well, it's not there. Just Mr. Andrews. And who's Mr. Andrews? That's Rep. Rob Andrews (D-NJ-01), who happened to be managing the debate at the time for Democrats, since he was in the process of offering some amendments of his own.
The key to knowing what was going on, then, was knowing that amendment #79 was the DADT amendment. That, and knowing what it meant when they said it would consider it out of order. And not only that, but also knowing what it meant that they said it at 7:12 pm on Thursday. If you can engineer a change in the order of consideration, you can announce that at any point in advance of bringing the amendment to the floor. But announcing it on Thursday evening when the amendment had previously been expected to come up on Friday probably meant it was just a matter of minutes or hours before #79 would come up. If they were just moving it up a few hours on Friday morning, they'd likely have waited to announce it until closer to that time. But indeed, amendment #79 did come up at 8:29 pm that Thursday evening.
Now, this is not a perfect illustration of how raw data can be transformed into change, because an hour before a House floor vote is typically much, much too late for activists to make a substantive impact on the outcome. But focusing purely on activist interest in witnessing the vote (for whatever value that adds in accountability), it's a great example of how access/data hacking only gets you part of the way home, at best. It still takes data analysis and an understanding/process hacking filter to be able to make usable sense of it.
And just to bring it back to the point of my first Tweet on the subject this morning, the world of access/data hacking transparency is (to everyone's delight) exploding today. Regrettably, particularly to those like me trying to find a way to sustainably provide the understanding/process hacking tools to a public audience that big dollar lobbyists and their clients have available to them all the time, the second half of the equation is woefully underappreciated and underfunded. Hopefully we'll see that change!