What a “Public by Default” government in Watertown, MA might look like

Hi,

What if every piece of information that flowed through the local government in Watertown was easily available for public use on the internet? Imagine if every credit card transaction, tax bill payment, arrest report, library book checkout and student assessment was published in the same way as your credit card bill. How might we as citizens be able to help our town if every aspect of it were public by default?

My name is Matt MacDonald and I moved to Watertown in 2010. I believe that people should and can make a difference in the operation of their local communities but that existing government systems often restrict how we can participate. I’m working to build tools and increase town employee awareness that increased and improved sharing from the town can let software developers like me create new applications that allow citizens to have a more informed, positive and engaged impact on our local governments.

Our local governments are accountable to citizens and we have existing laws in place that require all information outside of executive privilege to be made available to the people. While these laws exist, in practice our governments are sharing information with the public in ways that haven’t changed to keep up with the rest of the world. While posting a PDF document for a Town Council agenda on the Watertown website may seem "21st Century" it isn’t different than nailing a piece of parchment to a post at the horse corral.

I believe we need to radically change the existing system so that we no longer have to file freedom of information requests to access our own information. I can only imagine how we as citizens might be able to help if our local government worked to ensure that everything was public by default.

I have been working to encourage and push our local officials to share information about our town in ways that allow software developers like myself to better present and allow citizens to use that information. If you have used any of the MBTA smartphone apps like OpenMBTA or Catch The Bus you can get a sense of what might be possible if our public services and institutions focused on sharing information.

If you would like to get a taste of what a more open Watertown might look like please visit http://www.nearbyfyi.com/municipalities/1 where you can use the Salary, Revenue and Expenditure Exploration tools to get a greater window into the financial information from our town.

While our budget and salary information are the easiest bits of information to get access to I hope to keep working with our Watertown employees to share more information and I hope that you will support me in these efforts.

Thanks,
Matt