Canon (open)

Urbana calls Tuesday.  The home of the University of Illinois, which was home to ILLIAC, the first computer ever owned by a university, is trying to catch up to Davenport.  The guy on the phone is from their IT department, and he’s trying to talk his colleagues into opening their expenditures to on-line searches.

He says they are curious about our “Open Checkbook” section on this here website, and wondering if more harm than good may come from posting all the checks they write.   I walk him through our testing of the software and encourage him to fight the good fight.  Public entities spending public money should be as open about their use of taxpayer dollars as they can.

Davenport is strategically committed to openness and inclusion, so as technology improves to the point where we can make something more open, or more inclusive, we do so as normal operating procedure.  We were, thus, a test site for software company Socrata to develop the Open Checkbook application.  The leading edge is the bleeding edge sometimes, but the fundamental fact is we operate in the public trust, so there’s no point in pretending local government is some private enterprise, with trade secrets to shield from competitors.  I suspect not a day goes by without someone’s irrelevant confidentiality statement on a document they supply to the City being transformed into a public document when we receive it.  Cut and pasted e-mail “confidentiality signatures” are especially cute.

From the next e-mail I get, back to the day of my arrival; the business card they handed me on August 28, 2001 had the phrase “Working Together To Serve You” in italics at the bottom.  I thought more than a little about saying “thanks, but no thanks” to the business card.  They were nice enough to provide a box of 500 and who was I to discard this offering of City culture, so neatly stacked?  So I thought about it more than a little.

I asked what it meant, and no one could describe it in any more insightful way than a conventional business platitude.  The customer is always right.  Work smarter, not harder.  There is no “i” in team.  There’s donuts in Admin …

My ability to be wrong about a range of topics never disappoints, but as I listened and watched and tried to understand the organization’s culture early on, a plan was hatched.  I needed to be clear about a new approach to our work - in as few words as possible.  Those words became “Open, Agile, Purposeful”.   I asked Ilene to order new business cards with the new catchphrase at the bottom, and set about explaining my ungrateful impudence (some never forgave me).   Each of the three words was/is important, but they were not randomly ordered.

Improvement starts with openness.  Public trust starts with openness.  Openess to new ideas.  Openess to questions.  Openess to change.  Openess to the fact that, in dire moments, we hold people’s lives in our hands and there is no place in any such organization for dishonesty, incompetence or personal agendas.  The three words became many, as happens in government, when we discussed their importance at department head meetings.  The three words and their many offspring have lived a peaceable life for years over at that other website the City operates, available here.

But Urbana didn’t call about that other peaceable website.  They called about this one, and a feature of it that inspires an IT radical to open their government to scrutiny.  The smallest amount you’ll find on Davenport’s Open Checkbook is a one cent correction to Quality Construction Services for an overage.  The largest single check you’ll find is $1,891,544 to McCarthy Improvement Company as partial payment for runway reconstruction at the airport.  Let that sink in for a second.  If you want to track Davenport’s expenses to the penny from the comfort of your wi-fi hotspot, we were the beta site for this software.

From one cent to the largest expenditure, you’ll find everything in between and also find e-mails to and from the City’s CAO, along with a running collection of open records requests; specific questions and specific answers that can run to hundreds of pages.   All provided openly, for free.

Davenport is a national leader in government transparency, and as uncomfortable as that is for some who’d prefer to claim otherwise, that’s right where we want to be, and need to be.  Urbana?  The home to the first university with a computer back in 1952?  On their website, you can download a budget pdf and file a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request.  How the budget gets spent check by check or the detail of FOIA responses?  Nope.  The incoming and outgoing e-mail of their chief administrative official?  That’s crazy.      

You go, Urbana IT guy !