Assorted on Open Government

International Open Government Partnership to Include at Least 22 Countries at Launch Historic global 


 Open Government Partnership

Happy Birthday GAO

Accountability Is Their Middle Name

Some recent reports from GAO:
Economic Development: Efficiency and Effectiveness of Fragmented Programs Are Unclear

Climate Change Adaptation: Aligning Funding with Strategic Priorities

Financial Education and Counseling Pilot Program

Value-Added Taxes: Potential Lessons for the United States from Other Countries' Experiences

Data Center Consolidation: Agencies Need to Complete Inventories and Plans to Achieve Expected Savings

Millennium Challenge Corporation: Compacts in Cape Verde and Honduras Achieved Reduced Targets

Information Sharing Environment: Better Road Map Needed to Guide Implementation and Investments

Pakistan Assistance: Relatively Little of the $3 Billion in Requested Assistance Is Subject to State's Certification of Pakistan's Progress on Nonproliferation and Counterterrorism Issues

Drinking Water: Unreliable State Data Limit EPA's Ability to Target Enforcement Priorities and Communicate Water Systems' Performance

Information Technology: Continued Attention Needed to Accurately Report Federal Spending and Improve Management

Cost and Legal Authority for Selected Financial Literacy Programs and Activities

Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, Dating Violence, and Stalking: National Data Collection Efforts Underway to Address Some Information Gaps

The Democratic Republic of the Congo: Information on the Rate of Sexual Violence in War-Torn Eastern DRC and Adjoining Countries

Child Fatalities from Maltreatment: National Data Could Be Strengthened

NASA Needs to Better Assess Contract Termination Liability Risks and Ensure Consistency in Its Practices

Child Maltreatment: Strengthening National Data on Child Fatalities Could Aid in Prevention

Combating Terrorism: Additional Steps Needed to Enhance Foreign Partners' Capacity to Prevent Terrorist Travel

Antibiotic Resistance: Data Gaps Will Remain Despite HHS Taking Steps to Improve Monitoring

Tax Gap: Complexity and Taxpayer Compliance

Influenza Pandemic: Lessons from the H1N1 Pandemic Should Be Incorporated into Future Planning

American Samoa and Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands: Employment, Earnings, and Status of Key Industries Since Minimum Wage Increases Began

Tax Administration: Information on Selected Foreign Practices That May Provide Useful Insights

Can WikiLeaks model work for the government

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange barricaded himself in a house near the university and began to work. In fits of creativity, he would write out flow diagrams for the system on the walls and doors, so as not to forget them. There was a bed in the kitchen, and he invited backpackers passing through campus to stay with him, in exchange for help building the site. “He wouldn’t sleep at all,” a person who was living in the house told me. “He wouldn’t eat.”

As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to “another country that has some beneficial laws,” Assange told me, where they are removed at “end-point machines” and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks “do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.” The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through “virtual tunnels” that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but “this is vastly more secure than any banking network.”

Before launching the site, Assange needed to show potential contributors that it was viable. One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”

-Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency

Related:
WikiLeaks on Twitter

Wikileaks and Iceland MPs propose 'journalism haven'

Infographic of the Day- How Laws Are Made

How Our Laws Are Made

Why the Conservatives should win in UK!

I liked Cameron's promise of putting all government contracts online, and putting details of all government expenditures above 25k online.

Key Words: Post-Bureaucratic Age, Behavioral Economics, Politics and Human Nature, Transparency, Accountability, Choice Architecture, Missouri Accountability Portal,

Risks of too Open Government? Not at all

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Theory v. Practice - TSA Leak
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Related:
Task Force on Government Performance

Open Government Initiative

Assorted about budgets and transparency

Budget 2009: Lets Assume we have a Candle Opener (Australia)

OMB reveals transparency roadmap

The White House wants to make about 240,000 different sets of data available to the public over the next month. It took the first step Thursday by launching its Data.gov web site with 46 sets of data in 13 areas from 26 agencies.

New Zealand budget 2009: Downgrade alert?

Is Australia's Treasury independent?

The setting for the budget speech- India

Assorted

Why did the U.S. Housing go bust in 2006-07?;

There are essentially five theoretical models or frameworks that are used by economists to explain credit booms and busts. These are (1) changes in fundamentals over time; (2) irrational myopia as reflected in euphoric greed followed by fear or depressive panic; (3) implicit or explicit government subsidies and guarantees; (4) multiple equilibria or knife-edge problem; and (5) agency problems in assets management. Each of these frameworks is used to analyze the current housing problems, which triggered a U.S. financial meltdown and impacted a global economic crisis.

Banking and the Leverage Ratio

NIPFP-DEA Program on Capital Flows

India Financial Sector Self Assessment

FinancialStability.gov

Please torch my car

Structured Finance for Beginners

Credit Default Swaps, Herald of Doom (for Beginners)

The Global Integrity Impact Challenge

The Global Integrity Impact Challenge is seeking proposals for projects that use Global Integrity’s diagnostic tools to fight corruption. The best proposals get a US$1,000 prize and a chance to pitch the Partnership for Transparency Fund (PTF) for funding to implement their ideas.

See also Grand Corruption Watch List.

Economic Geography of the Military Industrial Complex

An excellent talk on economic geography of Pentagon's secrete programs-



Highly Recommended the first 10 minutes.

The Stimulus in Brief

President Obama delivers Your Weekly Address;

No one policy or program will solve the challenges we face right now, nor will this crisis recede in a short period of time. But if we act now and act boldly; if we start rewarding hard work and responsibility once more; if we act as citizens and not partisans and begin again the work of remaking America, then I have faith that we will emerge from this trying time even stronger and more prosperous than we were before.

Related;
www.recovery.gov

Barack Obama’s Prose Style

Open Government beta version

Tech Agenda 2009: 21st Century Economy

Tech Agenda 2009: Open Government


Tech Agenda 2009: Open Government" (2/2)

Related;
Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006
Sunlight Foundation

New Age Politics

The changing relationship between internet and politics?

Open for Questions: Participation, from campaigning to governing

Have you heard about the CoST Initiative?

The Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST) Criteria represent seven core requirements that will form the Pilot Phase. These criteria will be reviewed during the Pilot Phase, and will be amended, if necessary, before the design of CoST is finalised. The Criteria are:

1. For public-sector construction projects above an agreed threshold, there is regular disclosure of material project information to a wide audience in a publicly accessible, comprehensive and comprehensible manner.
2. Procuring bodies are subject to a credible audit process and, as far as possible, projects are subject to credible, independent financial and technical audits.
3. The adequacy of material project disclosures and audits are assessed by an independent, objective and technically competent Assurance Team, and reports published. The membership, terms of reference and activities of this team must be publicly disclosed.
4. The application of this approach is extended to the main procuring bodies responsible for public-sector procurement, and related contractors.
5. A Multi-Stakeholder Group (MSG) representing the interests of stakeholders has oversight of the implementation of CoST. The membership, terms of reference and activities of the MSG must be publicly disclosed.
6. Civil society is actively engaged as a participant in the design, monitoring and evaluation of this process.
7. A public, financially sustainable work plan for all the above is developed by the host government, including measurable targets, a timetable for implementation, and an assessment of potential capacity constraints.

Is the Government making things worse?

Prime MInister fired for cooking

Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej has been ordered to resign after being found guilty of violating the constitution over a TV cookery show.

His entire cabinet has also been ordered to step down.

Mr Samak was found to have violated a ban on ministers having outside interests by taking money from a private company to host a TV show...

In court in Bangkok, Judge Chat Chonlaworn said that Mr Samak had "violated Article 267 of the constitution" and that "his position as prime minister has ended".

-Court says Thai PM 'must resign'

FedFlix?

FedFlix is a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service (NTIS). Each month they send us government videotapes. We upload them to the Internet Archive and YouTube, then send the government back their videotapes and a digital copy for their files. No cost to them, more data for all of us

An American Hero in Government Openness

Daniel Ellsberg

Seven years and almost 50,000 American deaths later, after I had leaked the Pentagon Papers, I had a conversation with Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of the two senators who had voted against the Tonkin Gulf resolution in August 1964. If I had leaked the documents then, he said, the resolution never would have passed.

That was hard to hear. But in 1964 it hadn't occurred to me to break my vow of secrecy. Though I knew that the war was a mistake, my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president. It took five years of war before I recognized the higher loyalty all officials owe to the Constitution, the rule of law, the soldiers in harm's way or their fellow citizens.

For Civil Servants: What would you do in such situations?

Related;
Ellsberg paradox
A most ingenious paradox

Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms;

A discussion of a class of situations in which many reasonable people neither wish nor tend to conform to the Savage postulates of rational behavior. There is no way to infer meaningful probabilities for events, even approximately or qualitatively, from their choices in these situations, nor can they be described as acting as if they were maximizing the mathematical expectation of utility, in terms of any probabilities whatever. None of the familiar criteria for predicting or prescribing decisionmaking under uncertainty corresponds to this pattern of choices. Yet the behavior is deliberate and orderly, and it can be described in terms of a simple, specified decision rule. Such self-consistent behavior violating the Savage axioms seems to occur in situations that can be described as highly ambiguous. In reaching a decision under these circumstances, many people seem to act conservatively. Without actually expecting the worst, they choose to act as if the worst outcomes were somewhat more likely than their best estimates of likelihood would indicate.

Assorted

US Budget Watch

In Germany, Bribery Doesn’t Always Mean Corruption

Taking the Wheel in Nepal, Maoists Face a Rocky Road

Accra High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness

A Short Primer on Macroeconomics

Read Ben Bernanke's Fed: The Federal Reserve After Greenspan by Ethan Harris

Related;
A Term at the Fed: An Insider's View
by Laurence H. Meyer

Interview with Ethan Harris