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Washington's IT Guy
Timothy found a profile of Carl Malamud up at The American Prospect, characterizing it thus: "Carl Malamud — underrated work shedding sunshine on the sort of things that 'sunshine laws' may make legally accessible, but that often are not practically accessible. The man should be up there on the list with Wikipedia, Wikileaks, the big Free Software projects, and the Creative Commons."
But there's a few of us who know who he is (by reputation ... I actually know Roberta Shaffer, also mentioned in the article, and I think I'm on a mailing list or two w/ Aaron Swartz)
But I hadn't heard anything since the election and his trying to be appointed to the head of the printing office ... it's a shame he didn't get it. He's been a big force in getting government documents from behind paywalls.
Read the article if you don't know who he is -- he's done a lot of public good.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
What a bewildering summary.
It's only bewildering if you don't understand how public administrators work. Being that I deal with these people, on a much lower level than the Fed as I am extremely interested in hyperlocal politics and news, on a daily basis I have to say that, "shedding sunshine on the sort of things that 'sunshine laws' may make legally accessible, but that often are not practically accessible," puts it perfectly.
I regularly have to make repeated requests for information that should be publicly accessible. Unfortunately for the general public the politicos do not want this information to be made available, even if it has to be, so they put up every last roadblock they can invent to keep people like me from releasing it to the public.
Let's take for example local transit boarding data for 2007 to 2009. I wanted the number of people who ride the buses in our local transit co-op broken down at the lowest level. A simple task one would assume right? It was clear, based on their reporting, that they had the data at some sort of granular level as they can easily roll it up to yymon, quarter, etc. I also watched as bus drivers hand recorded the number of boardings and wrote them on sheets, by departure time, every single day for more than 2.5 years.
Well when I requested this information here was the exchange which occurred over 7 months:
1. We don't have that data.
2. We don't have that data in an easily accessible format (which would be in violation of Minnesota Statute).
3. We have the data but it would take a very long time to procure. Hundreds of man hours (again in violation of Statute). It will cost at least $250. Pay first, we'll provide it later.
4. We have the data and it will take considerably less time than we first thought. $50 for the data. Pay first.
5. Here's the data you paid $50 to receive. If you want more explanation you need to pay more (in violation of Statute).
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Now, I turned around and did exactly what they didn't want. I released it to the public and thus to the other state agencies who were originally told this data didn't exist in the way they wanted it. You can see the archive here (don't download the 7MB CSV unless you are really interested in the raw data as I host my site myself and I don't need my cable modem smoking all day long).
So why did they go through so much trouble, wasted man hours of their staff (including their counsel) just to keep this data out of my hands? Because they want to be the ones in control, even though they are mandated by law to provide it to the public, and they certainly want to make compliance with sunshine laws as difficult as possible to keep people from doing this time and time again.
So, unless you deal with that particular instance day in and day out for years, like I do on any variety of topics from any variety of local government entities, then you wouldn't have the faintest idea what that blurb meant. But to me it made perfect sense. I just hope that bringing this data to light and placing it out there for the public to interpret themselves isn't limited to skewed infographics and a couple of PDFs on Deep Water Horizon documents.