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Since July, the Treasury Department of Rhode Island has spent about $6,900 on stenographers, which it sometimes needs for hearings. And if you wanted to find a piece of financial minutia like that, it would take just four clicks to locate it from the front page of the website of the Ocean State’s general treasurer, Frank Caprio.
That website features an embedded Vimeo video player and multicolored icons inviting visitors to follow Caprio on YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia and a press release RSS feed, all of which link the treasurer to multimedia and social networking websites, as well as to a larger movement toward digital, or networked, government used at the highest levels of politics in the 2008 presidential election.
In February, the Rhode Island treasurer’s office debuted its online checkbook, based on software it developed in-house. A month later, the state’s cash flow, in the form of gross revenues and expenditures, made its way from the checkbook to the popular microblogging social network Twitter, which Caprio’s office had already been using to make announcements. And the process is mostly automated.
“An office technician does have to press a key every day,” Caprio said.
Technology can be an “amazing” tool for increasing transparency and efficiency in government — with the possible drawback of a busy citizenry tuning out the noise created by information overload, according to Jane Fountain, director of the National Center for Digital Government at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“That’s a lot of Twitter updates,” she said.
It’s also vital that the quality of information disseminated will be as important as the quantity — a feed of budgetary line items is good, but an explanation of why and to whom a contract is awarded is better, Fountain said.
Since last fall, President Barack Obama’s web-savvy campaign and administration have heightened the profile of digital government, Fountain said.
“Having (Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes) manage the web-based part of your campaign is unprecedented,” she said.
The disbursement of President Obama’s stimulus package, which Fountain said would resemble “a boa constrictor devouring the biggest pig ever,” will serve as a good test of digital government. At www.mass.gov/recovery, Massachusetts residents can watch as $8.7 billion gets spent in the Bay State, including money going into smart grid projects, electronic health records, broadband expansion, and National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grants.
Caprio and the stimulus aside, New England isn’t at the forefront of the digital government movement. According to a December 2008 report by Masspirg, a Boston-based public interest research group, 18 states — none of them in New England — require government expenditures be searchable online. The report also singles out the Bay State as behind the curve. For all the technical expertise the commonwealth hoards in Cambridge, Route 128 and elsewhere, Massachusetts ironically lags behind in digital government, Fountain said.
“It’s part of our history and the way we do things about politics that it’s probably a little less transparent than it should be,” she said.
Caprio said he wants his office to be more customer-friendly for taxpayers but also sees it as a resource for decision makers. He’s waiting for the checkbook or the Twitter feed to be quoted in debates on the floor of the state legislature. That hasn’t happened yet, but the early returns have been good, Caprio said.
“Even the most cynical talk-show type gives it a positive review,” he said.
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