Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age

Guest post by Colleen Kaman

It’s become increasingly apparent that efficient, transparent public institutions require citizens who are able to navigate the complexities of a data-driven society. Last week, I attended two sessions that grappled with the need for more accessible, innovative data projects. The first, the “Data into Action” plenary, was part of the Future of News and Civic Media conference at MIT. The second was the two-day Law.gov: Putting It All Together workshop, the last of a series of brainstorming sessions exploring how to systematically “open source” the law. Both emphasized the need to replicate locally successful open data projects in new locations and broader contexts.

The “Data into Action” panel focused on efforts that integrate real-time and other public data into civic life. Nick Grossman, Director of Civic Works at OpenPlans, spoke about what he sees as the convergence of data aggregation with social action, drawing on examples such as Big Apple Ed. He also touched on large-scale distributed initiatives that drive toward interoperable systems that would allow citizens to more easily interact with public services. The Open311 initiative is attempting to coordinate a standardized, open-access model for citizens to report on non-emergency issues. In a similar vein, Grossman announced that OpenPlans is partnering with the Knight Foundation on another project. This one will further develop the source code of EveryBlock.com, an earlier Knight-funded journalism experiment that tied public records, news stories, and other data to city neighborhoods. Called OpenBlock, this newer iteration will simplify the project’s source code and make it easier for news organizations to adopt the technology. (The slides for Grossman’s talk are available here.)

Reframing government in the context of these data standards, O’Reilly Media Gov2.0 Evangelist Laurel Ruma spoke about “government as platform,” a catchphrase that frames patents, corporate filings, regulatory data, legal materials and maps as the “raw materials” of governance. These materials become the components of innovative tools and strategies that invigorate society and the marketplace while improving the efficiency of government practices. Ruma offered that Apple didn’t try to create every application on the iPhone but rather created a space where collaboration between governmental institutions, entrepreneurs and citizens can drive innovation, often at the local level. Ruma spoke about cities like Manor, Texas, that are transforming themselves into “labs” in order to leverage networked technologies to respond more effectively to citizen needs. According to Ruma, Manor is not only using QR bar codes that allow citizens to receive real-time data on the go but is also rewarding innovation by setting up a points program that would allow highly participative individuals to become mayor of Manor for a day. (It’s open to non-residents of Manor as well!) Such incentives could help drive civic engagement by establishing clear relationships between citizen participation and government action.

By comparison, the Law.gov workshop represented a far more ambitious effort to use open source principles to transform the entire U.S. legal system through greater access to data. Currently, it is difficult and expensive to access primary legal materials online, something often done through subscription-only websites. The Law.gov initiative proposes to address these issues by establishing an open registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the country. Proponents include the Federal Trade Commission and the Mid-America Law Library Consortium as well as numerous law professors. Among them, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig has suggested that Law.gov will “do for the law what Google did for the Net.” In other words, just as Google offered a radical new approach to “search,” the initiative would transform how legal materials stored, accessed, and linked to one another.

Carl Malamud, president and founder of Public.Resource.org, has spearheaded the Law.gov project. He is no stranger to far-reaching attempts to make all kinds of standards widely available. In the past, he took on the U.S. federal judiciary, subverting the government’s courthouse search engine, known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records (or PACER), by posting millions of pages of federal court documents online and free of charge. Now, Malamud is trying to overhaul the legal system from within. His idea is that as members of the legal community become convinced that there’s a problem with the current system, categorizing and accessing legal material will make the system more accessible and amenable to open source principles. Since Malamud unveiled the Law.gov initiative last fall (his initial presentation is available here), he has organized a series of working groups to determine how to transform the initiative into a larger movement. The Harvard Law workshop was the last of these meetings.

During the workshop, Lawrence Lessig offered a practical argument for the Law.gov platform, suggesting that storing legal materials in outdated systems that are increasingly out of step with networked information exchange is not only deleterious to the law, it also holds back economic progress. Harvard Law Library Director John Palfrey considered whether, in fact, there is a “right” to access the law. The audience was split between those who saw it as a fundamental right (as in the right to counsel and access the courts) or as the right-minded thing to do. Tom Bruce of The Legal Information Institute recast the question of the fundamental right to broadly accessible legal materials, suggesting that rights-based arguments might be of limited importance for many people who are tasked with filing and tracking legal materials. For an effort to impose interoperability to be successful, Bruce suggested, it would need to be able to demonstrate to bureaucrats that it would improve government processes.

Throughout the day, the thorniest issues swirled around how to convince many different stakeholders that curate legal materials to abandon their entrenched practices in favor of a system that coordinates between jurisdictions. Most likely, Law.gov will apply several arguments to underscore the need for these proposed sweeping changes. When the session drew to a close, Malamud offered a few final words on the importance of applying open source practices to the legal system: “We’re trying to do a standard here, saying if you’re going to make a law, you need to make it in bulk.” Over the next several months, Malamud will draw up a report that will include the technical specifications, total costs, and standard procedures for the proposed repository. From it, he intends to generate broader support for his initiative, first from law school deans, and later from legislators and legal professionals. Both events suggest the profound impact that open source practices of collaboration, knowledge exchange, and networked participation are beginning to have on traditional governing institutions.

Colleen Kaman is a journalist and media researcher. She is affiliated with the MIT Center for Future Civic Media.