Idea Lab

NY Attorney General Should Practice Transparency He Preaches

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo made news headlines by coming down hard on American International Group (AIG), the company that has paid out millions of dollars in bonuses to some of the people thought responsible for the billions of dollars in losses that preceded government bailout money that continues to flow to the insurance giant. In a letter to AIG Chairman Ed Liddy (PDF), Cuomo requested a "list of individuals who are to receive payments under this retention plan, as well as their positions at the firm" and "a list of who negotiated these contracts and who developed...

• March 17, 2009
• 2 comments

Obama's Open Government Imperatives Must Trickle Down to Cities

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today President Obama issued two eloquent orders with the following subject lines: "Freedom of Information Act" and "Transparency and Open Government". Published on the first full day of his presidency, they constitute a sweeping manifesto about how he wants to govern at the Federal level. Those leading municipal government in this country-- mayors, commissioners, and department heads-- would do well to read closely. Change is coming. In the first memo, he writes that "the Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." He goes on to "direct the Director of...

• January 21, 2009
• 3 comments

Inaccessible Pothole Data in Chicago

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently in Chicago, as the weather warmed inordinately from a deep freeze, with a 70-degree swing in temperature, the attention of the media and the municipal workers turned to potholes. The two daily newspapers sent writers to a press conference at the city's "Pothole Command Center," where Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), Tom Byrne, and his top spokesman, Brian Steele held forth on the problem of holes in the street. From the Chicago Tribune story: "Byrne said a computerized map that tracks work crews and unfilled potholes will speed the patching process and added that an estimated...

• January 12, 2009
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U.S. Government Should Publish All Mortgages It Buys

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It appears that the United States government is going to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad mortgages in an effort to prevent the collapse of the world's financial system. If they do, I'd like them to publish a list of all of the mortgages they purchase -- the loan number, the address of the property, the lender, the amount of the loan, the status of the loan, the plaintiffs and defendants in any associated foreclosure cases, and so on. As far as I can tell, it's not currently possible for the public to determine the underlying assets...

• September 24, 2008
• 1 comment

Huang Qi, Journalist, Formally Arrested

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Huang Qi, the Chinese dissident who had been working to uncover information about school buildings that collapsed during the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, China, was formally arrested last week for illegally possessing state secrets. He had been in detention for weeks. Huang had already served five years in prison on charges of inciting subversion after publishing many articles critical of the government on his Web site, http://64tianwang.com/. He claimed that he was badly beaten in jail, and suffers headaches and depression. The parents of children who died in collapsed school buildings have been considered a possible threat to the...

• July 21, 2008
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Independent Government Observers Task Force Non-Conference, August 4 - 5 in Chicago

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I wrote earlier about the IGOTF, a "non-conference structured around three sets of working group activities": 1. Case Law (Working Group Chair: Carl Malamud, carl at media dot org). This working group brings together individuals groups involved in the day-to-day work of putting the courts on-line. Topics that will be considered include markup of citations in cases, "universal resolvers" for mapping citations to URLs, recycling of PACER and other documents, and other subjects as appropriate. 2. Municipal Governments (Working Group Chair: Daniel X. O'Neil, danx at everyblock dot com). This group will focus on issues involved in citizens attempting to...

• July 7, 2008
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Open Government Data and the EveryBlock Project

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At EveryBlock, where my main role is to work with municipal governments to uncover new data sets, we're experimenting with a new form of journalism where we treat freshly updated public records as block-level news. It's a big job to acquire ongoing feeds of government data, and we have a broader goal of spreading the gospel of open data. The two objectives: Get more datasets for EveryBlock so it can be a better Web site Convince governments to share that data with everyone, not just us can lead to some cognitive dissonance in the minds of government leaders. They have...

• May 1, 2008
• 4 comments