Cam brings to my attention a post of his from South Sea Republic canvassing some possible reforms to increase public scutiny of government goings-on, including one to create “Citizen Auditors”:

Another proposal of Scrymarch’s was Citizen Auditors. These are spontaneous citizen groups which rise up to audit government – a kind of flash-mob for government auditing. I think this would bring superior solutions, not in government waste, but in identifying expensive, ineffective and impractical policy – which ultimately has to be funded to be implemented. This would definitely take advantage of the wisdom and application of the people and in my opinion would bring some of the fastest returns and improvements.

This is good and well, but the question is how such a thing might be achieved. Read on for a few thoughts.

To begin with, this is arguably an extension of FOI schemes, itself part of the part of the four-part reforms introduced by the Kerr Report as a check on Executive power. The problem with FOI schemes is that requests are necessarily placed at a high level and that interpretation of the meaning and scope of requests is left to the Government.

What is really required is direct access to data and documents. There’s a saying amongst database designers: “When unsure, put in more”. The idea is that you don’t know what information will be of value in future, and since databases are pretty cheap to populate, why not store more rather than less data? In future you may think of a question which can only be answered by including a hitherto uninteresting series of data.

Suppose that data was even more accessible than the Government’s most open source, the ATSB. Suppose one could run arbitrary queries against security-cleaned copies of Government databases, perhaps copied on a weekly basis. Third parties would be able to perform all manner of detail inquiries that would be hard and slow to achieve through FOI requests.

The beauty of this approach is threefold:

1. It encourages exploratory reviews. Inquiries can be drafted, run and returned in seconds, rather than taking weeks of expensive haggling with FOI offices.
2. Data mining becomes possible, allowing unexpected but useful facts and relationships to be automatically discovered by third parties
3. Governments would themselves benefit. The effort required to integrate and open up these systems would introduce efficiency benefits from top to bottom.

The downside? Cost of establishment. Governments collect and shuffle enormous amounts of information. A “big bang” project would need excellent software engineering leadership to prosper, and will still easily take many years and a lot of money to complete.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

[edit]

Cam also brings my attention to the fact that the Department of the Parliamentary Library (DPL) have RSS feeds available of their publications due lobbying from him and others. The DPL is the private think tank for politicians and it produces enormous volumes of very detailed, very interesting work.

I should add to the wishlist above that RSS feeds and email lists should be available for all official documentation series and special reports etc.