Startup Shows What’s Possible in Government Transparency

What started in 2013 with a prototype system that sent email alerts to clients when specified keywords or phrases appeared in local government meeting agendas, minutes or documents, is now morphing into an aggregated compilation of city, county and school district records – all available for download by individuals and organizations.

Tom Van Heeke

Policy Analyst

A San Diego-based start-up called CivicArchive is building a searchable collection of local government records. What started in 2013 with a prototype system that sent email alerts to clients when specified keywords or phrases appeared in local government meeting agendas, minutes or documents, is now morphing into an aggregated compilation of city, county and school district records – all available for download by individuals and organizations.

It’s an exciting development and one that has the potential to be empowering for journalists, advocacy groups and ordinary Americans. Access to information is one of the keys to sustaining our democracy. It facilitates public engagement by empowering citizens to participate fully in the business of government. That participation represents democracy in action and acts as a check on our elected officials. This is all the more important in counties, cities and school districts – the layers of government with which Americans most commonly interact.  

CivicArchive powerfully underscores what is now possible in the realm of web-enabled transparency. Ever greater computing power and the internet enable us to corral big data from multiple sources and make it accessible in ways that were once inconceivable. With a little ambition, states could mimic the efforts of CivicArchive and build their own centralized online repositories of public records from every layer of government within their jurisdictions, and make them searchable and downloadable for easy viewing and analysis. At the very least, one can imagine cities and counties building smaller-scale information hubs of their own.

In the so-called Information Age, it continues to be a lot harder to interact with government than to do almost anything else. But the good news is that some jurisdictions are making tremendous improvements in how they make information accessible online. When it comes to shedding light on public spending, many cities are adopting online transparency measures, as we highlighted in our 2013 scorecard, Transparency in City Spending. At the state level, our latest Following the Money report documented how leading states such as Ohio are building cutting-edge transparency websites that tie in municipal data and aim to bring all public spending information in the state under one digital roof.

Every level of government should leverage the internet to provide easy and comprehensive access to public information. It’s exciting to see the private sector build tools to enrich our interactions with public data and set the pace of innovation, and now it’s time for our political leaders to take full advantage of what is possible. 

Authors

Tom Van Heeke

Policy Analyst