Transition

Transparency is one area where the Right an Left should be working together.  Fortunately, it's also something that President-elect Obama has promised to improve.  So far, his transition team has been doing it pretty well.   How well he does it will depend, in large part, on the incentives involved; in particular, the prioritization of transparency will depend on how easy (or hard) the Right makes it for Democrats to improve transparency. 

The Sunlight Foundation's John Wonderlich* notes a couple pieces of very good news from the income administration...

The Obama transition team released two new policies this week, a Creative Commons license and a radical disclosure policy. These changes don’t just signal a new relationship to the public, but also create a paradigm shift in how government manages information, and could lead to much bigger things to come from the administration. Requirements for affirmative disclosure mov

e the onus of dissemination to the government (unlike FOIA, which relies on citizen requests), and might just revolutionize the way our government views its communications. [...]

First, the transition team changed its copyright policy, and is now publishing under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. [...]

Next, the transition team introduced their Seat at the Table feature. At first glance, “Your Seat at the Table” might look like a kitschy PR portal. What is the entire change.gov site supposed to be, if not a seat at the table? A closer look, however, reveals that this specific feature is in fact different from the rest of the site — it’s the result of a significant policy change.

The Sunlight Foundation has much more at their post.   For now, this is a very positive start.  In the past, transparency has sometimes been used as a partisan tool to use against an opponent - or, worse, as a way to hold the activity of community members against the community creator.  If we want to see more of this, though, we should focus on holding the Obama administration accountable for their promises, not for how their community is used by other people. 

* I work with the Sunlight Foundation on their Open Senate Project.