Conflict-of-Interest Web Project
The emergence of the Semantic Web offers the potential to
revolutionize the economics of disclosing and accessing government ethics information.
This, in turn, offers the prospect of automating much of the
work that investigative journalists and bloggers must currently do
manually.
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Praise for iSolon.org's
“Dr.
Snider's The Dismal Politics of Legislative Transparency offers a
cogent explication of the inherent conflict between legislators and
legislative data, dismantling the mechanisms of legislative information to
expose the conflicting incentives often at their core. This argument has
assisted me in advocating for bulk access to legislative data, illuminating
the need for access to legislators' roll call votes, as well as the widespread
failings of legislatures to make this information available.”
--- John Wonderlich,
(for more praise, |
A precedent for a conflict-of-interest ontology is XBRL, the financial reporting language. Charles Hoffman, a CPA, proposed the idea for XBRL in 1998 and got the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants to create an XBRL standards committee in 1999. XBRL is now being adopted by financial reporting agencies throughout the developed world. In the U.S., the SEC mandated the use of XBRL for the largest public companies effective June 15, 2009, with the complete transition to XBRL set for June 15, 2012.
iSolon.org's Conflict-of-Interest Web Project was formally launched March 10, 2010 during a presentation at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Workshop on How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?.
Publications
Federal Trade Commission, Federal Trade Commission Staff Discussion Draft: Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism, May 24, 2010, Washington, DC.
J.H. Snider, Transparency in the Digital Age, presentation at the 2010 Freedom of Information Summit, May 8, 2010, Arlington, VA.
J.H. Snider, Automating-Conflict-of-Interest Reporting, presentation at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Workshop on How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?, March 10, 2010, Washington, DC.
J.H. Snider, Automating-Conflict-of-Interest Reporting, working paper released at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Workshop on How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?, March 10, 2010, Washington, DC.
J.H. Snider, Automating Watchdog Reporting, Nieman Watchdog, July 22, 2009.
Publications on Other Ontologies
Snider, J.H., "It's the Public's Data: Democratizing School Board Records," Education Week, June 14, 2010.
J.H. Snider, Would You Ask Turkeys to Mandate Thanksgiving? The Dismal Politics of Legislative Transparency, Journal of Information Technology & Democracy, Spring 2009. This is based on a working paper written for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
J.H. Snider, Democratize School Budget Data, Education Week, May 20, 2009.
