The Public Square Project

That's what The Public Square Project is all about.

Do you live in the Pittsburgh region? Do you have questions about local government and ideas for making it more transparent, innovative, and responsive? Then join The Public Square Project!

The Public Square Project is a non-partisan government watchdog organization working to improve the quality of local government in the Pittsburgh region by advocating for better access to public information, promoting government transparency, and educating citizens about the policy-making process.

Read more about the Project

On Thursday of this week, I was in Washington, D.C. to participate in a panel discussion on the importance of transparency at all levels of government. The panel was hosted by the Sunlight Foundation and Google and held at Google's D.C. office. I'll share my thoughts on the panel in the next post, but I wanted to first explain why I was there.

In addition to enjoying the milk and cookies served at the event(!), we were there to help launch the Sunlight Foundation's new Public=Online campaign, which is a national, non-partisan campaign seeking to create a transparent government built on open data and information. I was there to talk about ourvision for The Public Square Project and why transparency at the local level is so crucial to the success of cities like Pittsburgh.

One of the more powerful messages of the Public=Online campaign is that for government information to be truly transparent and free, in fact to be "public" at all, it must be online in as real time as possible. After all, this is the 21st century! The technology to make government completely open and transparent is available - it's out there, all around us - but what's missing is the political will to implement the policies and technology to make it happen.

That's where we all come in. By demanding better online access to government information, we will send a message to politicians that transparency must be a fact of our political life, period. We can now get instant access to all kinds of information, even on our phones – to the weather, sports scores, traffic conditions, and yet some of the most valuable information of all, government information, is trapped on paper in filing cabinets and only accessible during business hours and for a copy fee. In 2010, that's just crazy.

What's more, government information is usually only available after the fact, meaning that we, as citizens, have no opportunity to influence policy debates as they happen. That's why the tagline of The Public=Online campaign is "Government in Real Time". Transparency after the fact is too often meaningless.

At the heart of the campaign is a pledge:

Government transparency is critical to creating a better democracy, and of highest importance in how I cast my vote. I pledge, through my sustained engagement, to hold public officials accountable for being open and transparent.

I have taken the pledge, and I hope that you will too. Click here to sign the pledge. Let us know in the comments if you have signed the pledge because we want to work with you to make local governments in the Pittsburgh region national models for transparency and openness. I have also committed our organization to working with the Sunlight Foundation to help make the campaign a success in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. I hope that you will join us. We cannot succeed without your help.

If you don't know about the work of the Sunlight Foundation, I urge you to check out their website. Since Sunlight's founding in 2006, it has been wildly successful in supporting projects that use cutting-edge technology to make the federal government more open and transparent. My favorite Sunlight-supported projects include OpenCongress.org, MAPLight.org, and Code for America.  As 2010 progresses, we look forward to working with the Sunlight Foundation to bring these kinds of cutting edge tools to the Pittsburgh region.

How would you make governments in the Pittsburgh region more transparent?