Slashdot Mirror
White House Gets Green by Putting Federal Budget Online
coondoggie writes "Looking to save $1 million, 20 tons of paper, or close to 500 trees, the White House said today President Bush's 2009 Federal Budget will for the first time be posted online. The E-Budget will be available for downloading at the Office of Management and Budget Web site on Feb. 4. Typically the White House has paper-bombed congress and anyone else who wanted to read the budget with a tome which can reach 3,000 pages and weighed multiple pounds each."
To force anyone visiting it to print it out.
Now, all we need to figure out is how to let the constituency modify it.
This is an exercise that is left to the reader.
More
White House Gets Green by Putting Federal Budget Online
Really? I thought they got green by taking it out of your paycheck?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Why? Because everyone's going to have their assistants print the budget off for them.
You mean it will actually be searchable in an efficient, reasonable manner? Or will it just be one giant black rectangle playing the part of a 3000-page redaction?
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Nobody is going to read it.
Mission accomplished.
Did you see that scene in Fahrenheit 911 when they faxed the patriot act to congressmen overnight and then voted on it the first thing in the morning?
British politics may involve a lot of shouting and require people in strange wigs, but at least the read the laws and debate them and modify them several times before voting on anything.
My little Linux and tech blog
You need someone to use pdftotext and then use SQL to import it all to populate the wiki. It would be a couple of hours of work (you might have to do it a few times, PDFs can have strange artifacts) but not rocket science.
My little Linux and tech blog
I downloaded the 2008 budget just yesterday from here, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy08/browse.html Ooh, maybe they mean this is the first time the *2009* budget is available just like it is a first every year each time it's posted.
Paper is a renewable resource like rice or strawberries. It's grown on farms like any other crop. They aren't out there chopping down ancient redwoods for paper.
The issue of going paperless to save the planet was always bogus. Driving a mile in a car has a much larger impact on the planet than printing a page.
"Would you as president maintain a blog?"
Answer:"No I call the plumber to do all toilet repairs".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Also consider that electronic copies opens up the door to source control and therefore auditable revision history. Ever wonder who added that earmark in the dark of night, after committee, just hours before a floor vote so none of the voters could review it?
Serious. My team can't check in code without leaving a revision history, why should congressional staffers be able to modify legislation without leaving an auditable (revertable) trail? This would do wonders for our transparency and accountability problems in congress.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
Sure it does, individual sections could use the "dispute" feature on wiki software like the way wikipedia.org uses it. Individuals could comment directly on questions that arise. This could help organize grass roots efforts to push for specific changes.
3000 pages??? Just printing the budget puts a nice dent in the budget, huh?
Seriously. You know that trillion dollar deficit? Two words: Ink Cartridges.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The headline of the article implies that this is intended to be some kind of environmental decision, but nothing in the article appears to back it up. In fact, the guy quoted is primarily going on about the much-improved accessibility of the budget. It'll now actually be possible for people to get it (rather than forking out an impossible $200 just to read it), and being in an electronic form, it's much easier to search through and index, not to mention only reading or printing the bits you happen to be interested in.
At the moment I'm working at a government department (non-US) where we've been publishing information online for a while now,. People love it, both inside the organisation and those in the general public (journalists, opposition politicians, economists, and whoever else may have an interest). This is largely to do with the Official Information Act which, in New Zealand, basically states that government departments have to make available whatever information people ask for, unless there's a good reason not to. Over time it's resulted in most government entities publishing large amounts of information even when it's not requested, on the assumption that someone may ask for it sooner or later.
The annual budget is probably one of the most important blocks of information and it's also one of the hardest, because it tends to be full of massive amounts of tables and figures from all over the place and from all kinds of different sources and people who often like to do things in very different ways. Even in a small country it's a big logistical exercise. Recently redeveloping the website to make things more accessible was a 2 to 3 year job, simply because of the amount of historical data that had to be gone through and re-formatted with more accessible markup, with people either using scripts or just manually trawling through it. I guess the nice thing about it now, though, is that there are systems in place to make sure that new data gets marked up usefully in the first place.
Budgets are huge things to manage, as much because of the massive amounts of organisation that have to go into collecting the information and compiling it all together in a way that can be printed at all. Hopefully getting it out as a PDF would be the first step for the White House towards getting it more accessible.
...which simply says "70% military, 25% domestic defense, 4.99% other domestic concerns, 0.01% schools and education."
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
that's a good start, however for some time now I've been thinking that the government should be publishing real time expenses online through an easy to use interface. I live in Toronto, Ontario and our city has been suffering on the verge of bankruptcy even though the budget from the taxes is over 7.5 billion CAD/year. About 60% of the money goes to the unionized city workers, which is a shame, there is no competition for the city contracts really, it's all government based mafia. This is not a surprise given that the city is governed by an NDP idiot-troll and the province is yet again in the hands of a liberal pathological lier.
I would like to see the government's bank statements on line. If the city gets the 7.5 billion CAD a year from the taxes, I would like to see the current balance, look at all expenses in detail. If a million is given away here, another million there, I would like to see the details of every transaction.
If the city mayor suffers a defeat on his crazy tax proposals (something he concocted instead of looking at balancing the budget the correct way, without immediately imposing new taxes the NDP way,) then the mayor wants to punish the city with meaningless reduction in working hours of community centers and libraries, I want to see the savings in the budget. Of-course the truth is that there was no savings, since the union city workers are still sitting in those centers and libraries because the union will not allow the city not to pay these people and the only sufferers are the citizens who cannot use these public resources.
The government does not want the citizens to be able to see detail of every dollar that is spent, because if we did see these details, we would revolt.
You can't handle the truth.