With Liberty, and Information, For All?
Flickr Photo: FaysterNow that the stimulus package -- or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, if you're keeping score at home -- has been signed into law, the work of making it all happen begins. No matter what you think of the law itself, everyone in our sector needs to pay very close attention to Recovery.gov.
You've heard a lot on this blog, and many others in the sector, about the power of social media and the web to bring more transparency to our work. I know that as good, smart people working at good, smart organizations, we believe in the power of transparency. But it's difficult to put the theory into practice.
When data is stuck on servers, web publishing is slow and centralized. When your stakeholders can't chew on, discuss, and disseminate your data and messages, transparency can't happen.
But the hurdles to transparency are vanishing rapidly. More and more of our data is in the cloud, or accessible via APIs. Publishing to the web is now, in the worst case scenario, easy, and in the best case scenario, automagic. Social media tools give your stakeholders ways to interact with data like never before.
That's where Recovery.gov comes in.
Obviously, there's not a lot on the site yet. But it could be a very good model for how nonprofits can use the web to open up all the way and be as transparent as possible. On the site, you can already read the bill, see the big breakdowns of how the money is being spent, and explore the projected timeline for implementation and impact. My favorite bit so far is the jobs map.
Obviously, you aren't overseeing a stimulus package -- but you can use the same set of tools and ideas to show your stakeholders exactly what you're up to. That's what turns a one-time donor into a long-term supporter.
Here's what I think we'll see on Recovery.gov that nonprofits should think about:
- Real time data: The administration is going to be swimming in data, but you can bet they'll collect it in a way that makes it very easy to publish on the site. You can do it, too! Even simple tools like Google Docs means your organization can report real time data, online, anytime. More databases now have protocols and mechanisms that allow you to pull your data out and publish it online, so your site can always have your most current information, no updating required.
- Data Visualization: The downside to all that data is that it can be very tough for people to make heads or tails of it. You can see the administration gets that -- from the jobs map and the chart of how money is being spent. In our work, we need to apply the same lesson. How do we turn all those spreadsheets into the pictures and maps that clearly tell our story in an instant?
- A chance to be heard: Of course, implicit in the idea transparency is that folks get the chance to talk back to you. So far, the Recovery.org site only features the standard "Share Your Story" feature. You need to do at least that, preferably more. You need to build conversation into everything you can.
- Remixing the content: Government content can't be copyrighted, so you're free to grab and reuse any government created content on the site. But they've also made sure that third-party content is licensed through Creative Commons. They've gone out of their way to ensure you can use their content to share your own opinion and analysis. You need to do that with your own data.
We'll have to wait and see what else Recovery.org brings us in the way of transparency, but here are a couple of extra-credit items that they -- and you -- should consider:
- Use RSS: Don't make people come to you. The site should be available via RSS so that people can consume the content in their readers -- and republish it, as well.
- Give the raw data: Most of us are looking for the quick snapshot that tells us the key points about complex issues. But some of us really want to dive down into the data and see what we can make of it. Give people the raw data so they can play with it and think about your issue.
