Credit: Baloulumix

Turns out that cab drivers in New York City were, shockingly, overcharging passengers at a rate of $8 million over the last two years, reports the New York Times:

Using G.P.S. technology installed in cabs, the commission discovered more than 1.8 million trips where passengers were charged the higher rate. The total amount of the overcharge was $8,330,155, or an average of $4.45 per trip, the agency said. The agency said that drivers manually switched the meter from the standard rate of 40 cents per fifth of a mile to the 80-cents-per-fifth-of-a-mile rate that cabbies are allowed to charge in Westchester and Nassau Counties, but not in New York City.

To combat the overcharges, the commission said that within two weeks, a system would be installed in all taxis that would post an alert on the back-seat television screen when the meter is switched to the higher rate code. The alert would stay on the screen until the passenger acknowledged it.

Government data-wrangling has perhaps never found so high a calling.

If you were at PdF '09 in New York City, you heard the idea floated that "public means online." In other words, if the law or regulation requires some document or other resource to be "public," you can no longer get away with stuffing it in some filing cabinet that citizens have to make an appointment to go see. You gotta put it online.

Here's a neat development in that space. The Sunlight Foundation just announced this morning that Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) is introducing the Public Online Information Act -- or, naturally, POIA -- today.* In brief, POIA would require that within three years, federal agencies will have switched to the presumption that what they publish is accessible online, and that a federal advisory committee will be established to ensure that "public means online" is an operating principle that all three branches of the federal government abide by. (Using the Freedom of Information Act's shorthand as a guide, the correct pronounciation of POIA should be "poy-ah.")

Sunlight put together the below video to explain the whys and hows of POIA. The bill is expected to head to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by New York Democrat Ed Towns.

*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation. And if I'm remembering correctly, it was Andrew who kicked off the thinking on "public means online" at the conference.

The National Broadband Plan (pdf) being presented to Congress today is an important foundational document in the future development of the Internet in this country -- which is our way of warning you that we're going to be boring you with some of the details in the days ahead. But as promised yesterday, here are two more aspects of the plan that particularly touch on the ideas of open government, interactivity citizen participation:

• The National Broadband Plan proposes that the Federal Communications Commission should create an online database containing information it collects on the broadband speeds and services available to Americans, searchable by Internet service provider (AT&T, Verizon, Joe's Wireless), street address, so on and so forth.
• The plan also proposes that the federal government should structure the data it collects with the goal in mind that third-parties will use it to build decision-making apps to help citizens and businesses figure out which broadband service option best suits the way they actually use the Internet -- whether they're night-only light users, hard-core gamers, video watchers, or whatever the case may be.

The bigger problem is that, in many cases, people in the U.S. have one or two broadband providers to choose from. Three is considered an embarrassment of riches. But solving that is what the rest of the plan is for.

Bonus: Now that we have a PDF version of the plan, we can get a peek at what the online Spectrum Dashboard we talked about yesterday will look like. The FCC promises that this is the beta version:

Credit: The National Broadband Plan, FCC

The Washington Post's ombudsperson Andrew Alexander has an apology to make. He's super sorry that the Post doesn't do a better job exposing its readers to government data:

[T]he era when paper records were kept in dusty file rooms is fading. Today, "freedom of information" has been expanded to encompass the right to instantly tap vast quantities of public information in electronic form. The contents of these databases, from restaurant health inspection reports to toxic waste citations, help citizens improve their communities and their lives.

The Post has a journalistic obligation and a business imperative to provide easy online access to the data through its Web site. But it's fallen far behind at a time when its readers have a growing number of alternatives.

It's intriguing that some people within the Washington Post enterprise are interpreting the organization's mission these days as being a portal onto minimally-processed government data, and doing it with a thinly-veiled reference to the good ol' days of Watergate. That's reinterpreting "newspaper" to be a news organization, yes. But it's also rethinking "news organization" to include acting as a go-between between the stuff that government produces and the stuff that citizens might like to know about. But hey, as Alexander points out, today kicks off Sunshine Week across the country. No time like the present to start getting better at serving up to readers the source materials of government.

If not for the good of the country, then for the good, says Alexander, of the Post:

The Post should help its readers by becoming a robust online gateway to digitized information. If not, readers' loyalties will shift to another brand.

In Russia, bloggers are angrily rejecting the government's explanation of a car crash that killed a well-known Moscow doctor and another woman. (Hat tip, @KatrinaNation) In the wake of the crash, law enforcement officials blamed the two women, saying the drove their Citroen into on-coming traffic. Only thing is, a number of witnesses saw a black Mercedes swerve and hit the women's car -- a Mercedes that had a special license plate given to elites in Moscow and that happened to be driven by an executive with the Russian oil giant LUKoil. And that's tapping into anger over the special treatment that political and economic elites get in Moscow today.

Over on Global Voices, Alexey Sidorenko has the story of what happened next, beginning with the fact that "many people noticed how the official version of the road accident did not make any sense to start with."

In brief, Russian bloggers are poking hole's in the government's story, producing video mock-ups showing the implausibility of the government's explanation, organizing opposition, and making mashups that depict the LUKoil exec as a evil doer straight out of "South Park." Really, Sidorenko's full post is worth a read. Voice of America also has good coverage of this and other, similar car crashes in Russia.

Credit: daleonsouth (Photo caption: "Discovered I was without internet a couple of days ago...")

Just days before the Federal Communications Commission is set to make its über-exciting announcement of its new national broadband strategy, the Commission has launched a pair of web tools that empower citizens to measure the current state of American broadband.

The first new web tool from the FCC is the Broadband Speed Test. Input your street address, and the tool uses either the Ookla or M-Lab measuring programs to assess just how fast your Internet connection is, on four metrics -- upload speed, download speed, latency, and jitter (which seems to measure the stability of your hook-up). The exciting bit there is that, accompanied by a push for broadband labelings akin to nutrition labels, consumers might now have a better sense of just how big and steady a pipe they're paying for, and how big and steady a pipe they're actually getting.

The FCC's second new web tool is a "Broadband Dead Zone" tool with which Americans can let the federal government know that they're not getting broadband in their homes, and whether or not they'd like to be.

On one level, the Broadband Speed Test and Broadband Dead Zone finder are a pair of nifty consumer-empowering tools. But they're also more than that, in an institutional sense. Accurate real-time data on where broadband runs in the U.S., how expensive it is, how reliable it is -- that's treated like the Queen's jewels by the telecom companies. Coping with the current state of U.S. broadband is difficult when you're oblivious to what the current state of U.S. broadband really is. What we're looking at here is an attempt to give the government a bit more of an even hand in that relationship.

Not bad for a couple of basic web tools.

Credit: The Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation is the group of folks out in San Francisco who concern themselves with considering how the world might play out over the next 10,000 years, so it makes sense that when Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for open government Beth Noveck headed there to give an address recently, her mind was on the long term -- as in, how political decisions with perhaps generations-long impact are made by people who might be out of power in two years (if not sooner). "Very long term decisions that affect the fate of our planet, the fate of our economy, the fate of our major systems of health care and education," Noveck said, "are being made by people who are in very short term political positions."

It's a problem that others have identified. But Noveck comes at it from an intriguing angle. If decisions are made quickly but people with a distinct lack of long-range vision, then we can help ameliorate the situation by going deep -- that is, pulling into service a wider range of people to act collaboratively. It's the spirit, in many ways, of Rep. Tim Walz's project to group-vet 98 earmark requests we profiled yesterday. It might come across as tech-tinged West Coast froo-froo thinking. But as Noveck points out, it's not exactly new. She tells an annecdote about how, when in the 1790s Thomas Jefferson headed up the U.S. Patent Office back, he was having trouble with a patent, and so wrote a friend who was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and said, Hey, I don't know anything about alchemy. Can you help me out?

As for what the Obama administration has accomplished in the collaborative government space, Noveck points to things like Data.gov, Recovery.gov, the posting of White House visitor logs, the Sunlight Foundation's annotation of the health care summit video stream distributed by the White House, Apps for the Army, and more. You'll notice that a heavy emphasis on transparency/disclosure, rather than actual collaboratioin, in that batch of accomplishments. And Noveck admitted that the trick of engineering experiences to produce constructive participation is one that the Obama administration is still practicing. "People have to know what's being asked of them," she said. "And we have a long way to go to learn how to do that."

One additional thing that jumped out from Noveck's talk is that her focus on tech-centric "open government" actually shares a great deal in common with the broader current discussion over ending the filibuster, calling a consitutional convention, and otherwise rethinking the instutitons of government. Noveck, for example, used an Alexis de Tocqueville quote: "I am tempted to believe that what we call necessary institutions are often no more than institutions to which wehave grown accustomed." The rest of that quote? "And that in the matters of social constitution the field of possibilities is much more extensive than men living in their various societies are ready to imagine."

Go ahead and grab the audio of Beth Noveck's Long Now talk here.

(One fun little tidbit from her address: as Noveck puts it, the Obamas "crowdsource" the weeding of the White House vegetable garden. Those working for the White House can sign up for a volunteer shift. Noveck notes that there's no shortage of volunteers, and nary a weed in site.)

Across the country we've been seeing good government reformers slowly coming to the terms with the fact that existing electronic discolsure laws are about as effective at ensuring transparency as a water gun is at putting out a house fire. They're the wrong tool for the job, mostly because they've stayed stagnent while the way that people use e-mail, cell phones, SMS text messaging, and more has rapidly evolved; we've reported, for example, on efforts by open government advocates to deal with the device-to-device BlackBerry messages popular in many government buildings but which largely fall outside the range of public disclosure laws.

Which brings us to Sacremento. There, reports the San Jose Mercury News' Denis C. Theriault, the State Assembly's brand new Democratic speaker, John Perez, has made waves by saying in his inaugural address on Monday that, from this point forward, text messages between lobbyists and lawmakers are "banned" during floor sessions or committee business. Here, exactly, were Perez's words:

Starting today, text messages from lobbyists are banned while we're on this floor or in committee doing the people's business. Californians expect us to pay full attention to the issues and to each other -- and they deserve to know who is involved in the debate. They need not worry that special interest lobbyists are secretly sending messages of opposition or support to us as we deliberate.

That might come across as an encouraging development, but some critics quoted in Theriault's piece are appropriately worried that a death-to-lobbyists'-texts edict but be satisfyingly full of sound and fury, but, really, not all that meaningful.

Better, they say, would be for Sacramento to do what the San Jose city council just did:

[T]he San Jose City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved a policy that watchdogs consider one of the state's most far-reaching when it comes to disclosing text messages and other electronic communications about public business -- even if sent on private devices or accounts.

The city policy requires council members to disclose communications received on their personal e-mail or cell phones during meetings -- either from lobbyists or from others with a financial interest in the matter under discussion.

The concern is that if these electronic disclosure laws aren't made both nimble and powerful, then savvy folks will just adapt their electronic practices to avoid them. Why would that be a concern? Well...

Lobbyists, as they filed out of the Assembly chambers after Perez's remarks Monday, were joking with one another about the ways they could find to escape the ban.

 

A fast tip of the hat to White House deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin, who had this to say Friday at a forum on open government:

“I would be thrilled to make this a type of political competition ... to see who can be more radical in their openness, in their data distribution models ... trying to prove to the citizens they can run a better government,” reports Kim Hart of TheHill.com.

One of the most interesting elements in this Thursday's "summit" at the White House on health care reform is the Administration's commitment to broadcast the proceedings live. But it's not just inviting C-SPAN into the room (finally), or posting the video on the "/live" section of WhiteHouse.gov. The White House new media operation is giving the embed code to anyone who wants to host the video on their own website. I'm pasting the code in below so you can see what you get, for now...