Government-wide Information Sharing for Democratic Accountability

In a representative democracy, average citizens should be able to easily monitor the public actions of their representatives and the politically powerful who seek to influence those representatives. New semantic web technologies make such monitoring more cost effective to do than ever before. But while these technologies have been widely used to monitor the weak, they have not been used to monitor the powerful, who often cite privacy and cost concerns as excuses to avoid such monitoring. This paper recommends asking the president of the United States to 1) use the new technologies so the American people can more easily monitor his public, official actions, and 2) serve as a showcase for Congress and the rest of the executive branch of government-wide information sharing for democratic accountability.