My colleague Phillip Herndon is right: South by Southwest Interactive was a hyperconnected tangle of bodies. Not only were there an overwhelming number of new platforms and applications to check out, social media experts from agencies, tech companies and advocacy organizations were all sharing their latest and greatest ideas in using these new platforms for “the greater good.”
A common theme in many of the political and advocacy-oriented panels that I attended was the idea that social media’s vocabulary is honesty and transparency. As trade organizations, political candidates and government officials have adopted social media, they have needed to adopt the vocabulary of transparency to connect with the community.
So if social media has encouraged transparency, can the opposite be true as well? Can policies of transparency encourage the use of social tools to solve public problems?
This is why I was attracted to a panel that featured two officials from the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. (And the fact that I’m a political junkie and economic policy nerd at heart.) Michael Castellon and Jeremiah Akin, the E-Communications Coordinator and Data Team Leader (respectively) of the TCPA went through two different examples of how transparency has encouraged social media activities.
- Government agencies have found they can use their data transparency to proactively solve problems. Castellon and Akin helped create ClaimItTexas.org, a web platform that not only places unclaimed properties on an interactive and searchable map platform. It allows constituents to find out if they have unclaimed property. Currently one in four Texans have unclaimed property, and the platform helped return more than $163 million in property value to its rightful owners.
- Government organizations have found that by opening other forms of data, they can empower citizens to help find and solved unidentified problems. That’s why Castellon and Akin helped create TexasTransparency.org, which essentially is a way for taxpayers to look into the checkbook of the State of Texas. Castellon argued that having a policy to require open data as well as a platform for citizens to access that visualize that data “means democratizing information and crowd source problem-solving.”
So if transparency policies and open data platforms can help solve multi-million dollar problems at the state level, can open data visualization help solve multi-trillion dollar problems at the federal level like our budget deficits? Data from Recovery.gov has certainly been used by both supporters and opponents of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus program, showing that transparency can lead to a better, more sophisticated political debate. And House Republican leaders have created YouCut, a platform that encourages constituents to submit their ideas for cutting and prioritizing items in the federal budget.
Why go through the trouble of opening up government data to the public and creating visualization tools for constituents to use? Not only is there the expectation from taxpayers for this type of transparency in the digital age, but as Akin put it during the panel, “Government data visualization isn’t only about visualizing problems; it’s about finding solutions.”
