Open government, the Internet way

One set of ideas would increase public access to government information. Obama pledged to loosen President Bush's restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act, an underappreciated law that allows the public to see behind official secrecy by obtaining internal government documents. Obama also said he would require White House officials to publicly disclose all of their communications with interests outside of the government about pending regulations—a reasonable way to discourage end-runs around agencies by the politically connected. More ambitiously, but more problematically, he proposed to require all executive branch departments and agencies to "conduct the significant business of the agency in public." That's nice as an applause line, but in practice it's difficult to reach thoughtful decisions under a spotlight; transparency should not deny decision-makers the opportunity to float ideas, test theories or simply ponder choices without fear of public exposure and backlash.

The best ideas in Obama's speech offered creative thinking on using the Internet to provide ordinary citizens new means of monitoring and influencing their government. As president, he said in a recent interview, one of his goals would be to apply "the power of the Internet to open up the process and create transparency." It's no surprise that Obama would be sensitive to the opportunities that the new technology creates. His campaign, with his appeal both to young people and better-educated voters, is a genuine Internet phenomenon. He has attracted more than 130,000 friends to his MySpace page. His YouTube page boasts nearly 4.5 million views (compared to 731,000 for Hillary Clinton.) Earlier this week, he announced that a stunning 110,000 donors have contributed to his campaign through the Internet.

The first Obama-sponsored bill in Washington that became law also focused on the Internet. The so-called Google for government bill, signed by Bush last fall, requires the government to establish a website detailing almost all of its spending, such as the contracts it signs and the groups to which it provides grants. In the proposals Obama unveiled last month, he said he would build on that foundation by also listing all tax breaks on the Internet and committing, as president, to post all non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signed or vetoed it.

Each of those proposals fit with the principal way governments at all levels in America have used the Internet so far: primarily as the world's largest filing cabinet, or community notice board. From Bush's e-government initiative to the websites of countless counties and cities, governments are using the Internet to more widely distribute basic information—office hours, licensing requirements, registration forms for cars and trucks.

But if government is aggressively using the Internet to provide information, it is much less advanced at using it to promote interaction, notes John Horrigan, associate director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Most government communication through the Internet is still one-way: A citizen goes online to obtain a fact posted there by a government official. That's a waste of the medium's potentially most valuable application to civic life: its capacity to create community and encourage two-way communication.

On that front, Obama's ideas could be most valuable. He says he will require the heads of all departments and agencies "to employ all the technological tools available to allow average citizens not just to observe, but to participate and be heard on the issues that affect their daily lives." Better yet, he wants to require his Cabinet officers to hold regular online town hall meetings to air the issues before their departments and hear concerns from the public.

That could be a terrific innovation. Cabinet secretaries now spend most of their time dealing with the constituency groups that collect around their departments like barnacles on a ship; hearing directly from the public would be a novel, and potentially bracing, experience for many of them. In the interview, Obama said he thought such exposure would help even for those at the pinnacle of the Cabinet hierarchy, the secretaries of State and Defense. "We are obviously going to have to shape it in a way that is not disruptive to the operations of our Defense Department," he said. "But I do think it will be healthy for the head of any department, including the Department of Defense, to hear from say, a veteran or a veterans' parent, who has been mailing out flak jackets to the troops and body armor because they are not getting adequate provisions."

For some perspective on Obama's ideas, I spoke with Eli Pariser. As executive director of the political action committee associated with the giant online liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org, Pariser has spent much of the past six years experimenting with ways to re-connect people to political life, primarily through the Internet. Regardless of what people think about MoveOn's politics (unreservedly liberal), almost all experts in both parties believe the group, now with more than 3 million members, has cut the mold in building a 21st century political organization centered on the Internet.

Pariser generally liked Obama's proposals, such as online town halls. But Pariser said Obama's ideas should be considered just the beginning of the conversation on how to reconnect citizens and government through the Internet. For a preview of what more is possible, he pointed to the website maintained by the British Prime Minister's office. One link off of the homepage lists a series of regular online chats with Cabinet ministers of the sort Obama wants to adopt in the U.S. Another link goes much further: It allows ordinary citizens to create or sign online petitions that urge the government to adopt or change policies. The system, designed in cooperation with a non-partisan group called mySociety, was launched last November, and since then more than 22,000 petitions have been started, drawing more than 4.4 million signatures from 3.2 million distinct e-mail addresses—this in a country with a population of only 60 million. Nearly 8,000 petitions are currently open for signature.

On Thursday morning, the most popular of them included proposals to change the way student loans are repaid and to block spending cuts for the Royal Air Force's aerobatics team—not earth-shattering concerns, but not trivial ones either. The government provides responses (not only posted online but sent by e-mail to all the signatories) to every petition that attracts a modest 200 signatures or more. Earlier this week, the government of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposed that the House of Commons adopt rules to consider whether the petitions should be debated in Parliament. The process, inevitably, produces its share of misfires: The second most popular current petition aims to stop "proposed restrictions regarding photography in public places"—of which the government, in its response, says none are contemplated. But as a creative means of reconnecting government and citizens through technology it runs rings around anything now underway in the U.S.

The sort of interaction that the British system provides, or that Obama touted so passionately in his speech, carries undeniable costs. In this highly polarized political era, with bloggers who confuse contempt with conviction and talk radio hosts who mistake invective for analysis, even the most reform-minded president understandably may hesitate about opening the windows of government too widely for fear of what their opponents might throw in. It's also true that most Americans probably will never have the time or inclination to press their views on government no matter what means are available to help them do so.

But the rising number of donors, voters and volunteers surging into political campaigns these days suggest that in our modern era of intense partisanship, millions probably would seize those opportunities. And allowing those voices to be heard would more than justify some turbulence. Pariser sensibly says the key to maximizing civic engagement through the Internet is to accept that some embarrassment comes with the territory when increasing participation. (He painfully learned that lesson when two contestants in a MoveOn contest to design an ad about Bush embarrassed the group by producing proposals that compared the president to Hitler.)

"The interesting dilemma is that for any individual [political leader] it's going to be hard to make the case for these transparent, bottom-up mechanisms because all of their public relations people will say, 'no, no, no, you are going to get embarrassed by the crowd,'" Pariser said. "But over time, people will recognize that there is a lot more to be gained through real communication and real transparency and the trust and authenticity that offers." That's sound advice for any president who wants to use new technologies to help solve the old problem of remaining connected to the country from behind the White House gate.

Ronald Brownstein is The Times' national affairs columnist.

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