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.

Radical Transparency's Use Cases

An emerging entry in Wikipedia is "radical transparency." Two references are cited so far:

• Wired's 2007 article "The See-Through CEO" by Clive Thompson


• David Brin's book "The Transparency Society"

Thompson opines that "the internet has inverted the social physics of information." He cites the 2007 actions of Redfin, the online real estate brokerage firm, which was moved through its blogs and press releases to disclose aspects of the clubbish brokerage business. For example, Redfin's blog includes a spreadsheet with its current (April 2009) transaction summaries.

Bill Moyers' Journal featured an interview with Daniel Coleman. Coleman discussed his book, Ecological Intelligence, in which he promotes life cycle assessment (a concept taken, I'd argue, from late 70's IT, when it was introduced for federal IT oversight). Initiatives thought to be "green" might turn out to be less so when the full life cycle of the product or process are considered. (Coleman recommends GoodGuide.com).

Beyond Redfin and life cycle initiatives, what are the use cases for radical transparency?