Transparency

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not pleased with the current trend toward transparency in government spending. Transparency in spending, after all, is very much like the Open Source model in that anyone in the world (with enough time, ability, and resources) could audit the expenses and determine whether money is being misspent. In the software world this gives developers the ability to dismiss complaints about the product by stating, "You have the source, you decide what needs to be done and then let me know what you want to do." This offloads the responsibility for fixing problems to the masses and frees the developer to do more developerish things. It works a little differently for government spending, but the principle is the same. The state of Utah, for example, recently launched transparent.utah.gov, which lets Utah citizens and concerned netizens browse the 4.6 million transactions the state conducted last year. Now the power of the online community can be leveraged to police the state's spending at a fraction of the cost of qualified professionals! If one person were hired to review these transactions and spent a single second on each one it would take more than 53 days to review them all (not counting sleeping or eating), but with the power of the Internet even 100,000 individuals could do this job in just over 3 minutes!