Bureaucracy frustration followup update June 30 2009

In my last post I wrote about my personal frustration with government and insurance bureaucracy, and offered some narrow suggestions as to how certain logjams could be broken. I just read an interesting story on one of the tech gossip sites regarding a new effort to put the US government's spending online for everyone to see.

While this particular effort is being done privately, the Obama administration is also trying to develop transparency regarding how the government spends, and attempting to put as much of that online as possible. Regardless of who does it, a private or public effort, it's going to be quite a job. According to this story, the government has over 100,000 databases, some of which are written in COBAL (an ancient computer programming language; difficult to use even when it was considered state of the art), or even worse, still in paper archives. Truly, this is the crux of the problem - information is not available freely to those who use it.

There has also been resistance to having information available online. Many agencies resist making information freely available because doing so makes them politically vulnerable. Also, there is no political will to follow through with a project of this magnitude because everyone is focused on the next four, or eight years.

We should be demanding that information flow freely from our government to us. The lack of free flowing information creates roadblocks which cost us money. Something as simple as how much and where the government spends its money should be available to everyone via an online update, at least in general terms. Of course, the other problem with this is that the details can be so overwhelming that people's eyes would get glassed over trying to figure it out. That effect is something that bureaucrats count on to ensure that no one looks closely enough to understand what's going on.

A wonderful thing about the information revolution is the development of tools for sharing and understanding vast quantities of information. The leveling of the playing field, or the flattening of the world, as author Thomas L. Friedman would describe it as, has made the world smaller, and the impact of the individual greater, then at any time in world history. It has revolutionized the way we work, buy, sell, and communicate. It's time that our government use the tools available and begin to open itself us to the masses.