WNYC's Lehrer Show Probes Effectiveness of U.S. Transparency Initiatives

WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show recently mounted an effort to explore through crowdsourcing the usefulness of the USA Spending Database to citizens and researchers. Accompanying Lehrer's team for the radio analysis was US CTO Aneesh Chopra and Beth Noveck, Deputy Director for Open Government. Some of the issues raised, but not well addressed:

• Are specialists are needed to perform analytics on the data provided?
• Is it necessary to know "what you're looking for" in advance?  In other words, you don't know what you're missing.
• What resources are provided to citizens if they believe there is data that should be available, but has not been provided? 
• Does the initiative include mechanisms to encourage (or require) transparency through process workflow and other techniques?

The discussion can be found in WNYC's broadcast archives.