WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

Author:Micah L. Sifry
Language: eng
Format: epub

Cabinet Minister Tom Watson–whose formal title was "Minister for Transformational Government"–was an enthusiastic proponent of Steinberg and Mayo's report. An early convert to blogging, he had personal experience as a politician who actually understood how opening oneself up to a transparent dialogue with one's constituents can improve government in many ways. A year after the launch of the prime minister's e-petition platform, Watson was thinking ahead in radical terms: "Over seven million electronic signatures have been sent, electronically, to the Downing Street petition website," he noted in a speech about the power of information. "One in ten citizens have emailed the Prime Minister about an issue. The next stage is to enable e-petitioners to connect with each other around particular issues and to link up with policy debates both on and off Government web space." Watson gave a wonderfully illustrative example of how this could work with other government websites that attract lots of traffic from the public:

I recently registered my local Labour Party with groupsnearyou.com. This is a new site provided by the MySociety people. It's a site for people who run small-scale community focused groups. Through the site, I found West Bromwich Freecycle. I'm the Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East and I didn't know about an important recycling initiative going on in my own patch. This information now means that a bag load of clothing for a small child and a habitat sofa are about given a second chance to give pleasure.

A simple, free tool enabled a small social good. Do this on at scale and you have a very good thing going on. Nine million people now pay their car tax online. Wouldn't it be great if when they have finished their transaction they can be directed to a kind of golden page that lets them find small local community groups in their area or offers them a menu of things to do that are good. Recycling one sofa is one thing. Recycling nine million sofas is a big contribution to sustainable communities.25

This idea of transparent government acting as a convener of citizens around common public goods has yet to happen in Britain. In February 2009 the Labour government started a modest experiment called "Show Us a Better Way," which was a £20,000 contest that encouraged the public to submit ideas on how to improve the way public data was made available online. But little more came of it, as the government was running out of steam on other fronts and politicians like Watson were caught up in Labour Party infighting as the Parliament expenses scandal broke and general elections approached. The idea of government websites enabling public collaboration is also probably still ahead of its time. As Steinberg noted in the wake of his work for the Labour government, "If the government said that people can't drive on the roads to go to a rally to protest something, because it would lead to bad press, everyone would protest. Yet when government says that it

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