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Delaware Checkbook a Step Backwards for Transparency

Posted by Mark Headd under Open Government

Earlier this year, the State of Delaware added a new section to its official website - the State of Delaware Online Checkbook.

If you like this website then you can probably hear “I Want it That Way” playing in the background as you vigilantly prepare your desktop PC for the onset of Y2K. But while you’ve been jamming to the Backstreet Boys and getting ready to party like its 1999, the e-Government movement has been chugging right along.

Don’t get me wrong, I think its great that the State of Delaware is making more information public - all things being equal, more public access to information about how state government conducts its business is a good thing. However, I take issue with the way that Delaware is doing it.

To deploy the State of Delaware Online Checkbook, state officials have sanctioned the creation of one of the worst web sites I have seen in a long time. Aside from looking like the work of someone who has only recently discovered AJAX (and wants to add as much hip new AJAXian elements as possible to impress the ladies) it’s a horrible mishmash of inline CSS and nasty table-centric layout. I haven’t tested it formally, but I’d be willing to bet that this website fails every conceivable test for access by the disabled that there is. I doubt very much that this site meets the state’s own standards for accessible web content.

Even for those without impairment, this website presents challenges for anyone who wants to take a critical look at state expenditures. The data is not downloadable - you can’t click on a link and download a CSV file for an agency (at least nowhere that I could find). Instead you have to navigate, page by page, through arcane listings of expenditures - many with highly non-descriptive summaries. If you want to download this information and use it in a spreadsheet to compare spending across agencies you’re out of luck. Because of the cheezy AJAX pagination that litters the site, you can’t link to anything meaningful either, instead users are simply forced back to the summary for a particular agency. This is one of the most unusable site I have seen in a very long time.

Contrast this with what is occurring in the District of Columbia, New York City, San Francisco, Vancouver and even at the federal level courtesy of the Obama Administration. These governments are providing public access to raw data sets, making it easy for anyone (or anything) to consume this information, slice it up, analyze it and create interesting mashups. Delaware’s lame attempt with the Online Checkbook is like a time warp back to the very early days of e-Gov 1.0, when governments hid their data behind an opaque web facade that dictated how citizens would get to access it. It hasn’t been done like this in a long, long time.

Not only are other governments posting data online in highly usable formats, many are also asking citizens what they want to see next. In the last few weeks, the Obama Administration has set a new challenge for federal agencies through the Open Government Directive, which encourages agencies to publish information online in “machine readable” formats and to solicit input from the public on how to enhance the quality of government data.

The State of Delaware’s current attempt at publishing open data is so far away from what is considered standard in the current e-Government environment that it must be viewed as a step backwards. This is almost worse than having no data available, because it lets state leaders claim they are making government more transparent when all they are doing is muddying the waters.

The irony here is that it was the state’s then Treasurer (and current Governor) Jack Markell who took up the cause of e-Gov 1.0 during the early days of the Minner Administration. Apparently, his thinking on e-Government has not changed much since then.

Maybe he just wants to keep spinning those Backstreet Boys records as well…