Meeting the Mandate: National and Statewide Perspectives
Meeting the Mandate: National and Statewide Perspectives
Our moderator will be Mark Woodward, former Editor-in-Chief, Bangor Daily News
Panelists:
Amanda Wood, Director of Governmental Affairs, the office of U.S. Senator Susan Collins
Kelly Hokkanen, General Manager, InforME, a partner of Maine.gov
Tarren Bragdon, Chief Executive Officer, The Maine Heritage Policy Center
Reply to this post with questions for our panelists.
sunny_hughes 4:11 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
Kelly Hokkanen is the General Manager of InforMe, the public-private partnership entity operating the award-winning website of the State of Maine, Maine.gov.
sunny_hughes 4:16 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
Hokkanen says that there are many steps in Transparency… Putting information online is a first step. Maine.gov has over 300,000 pages of content with over 15 million hits per month.
sunny_hughes 5:07 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Maine.gov is self funded?
Hokkanen says “yes” that they may for example receive an agent fee for issuing a hunting license. This fee can go towards funding the site. Statutory fees can also be used to cover expenses. There is an oversight board to make sure InforMe has sufficient funding and the funding model is adequate to fund the service over time. “We don’t receive any appropriations.”
QUESTION: How do you measure your cost effectiveness?
Hokkanen: There are a lot of ways we accomplish oversight: 1) Our board makes sure our fees and levels of service are appropriate. We contract with an Augusta company to provide the service; 2) We look at return on investment for agencies.
sunny_hughes 4:29 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
Amanda Wood currently serves as Director of Governmental Affairs on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for Ranking Member, the Honorable Susan M. Collins (R-ME). She supervises federal agency oversight including programs at the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management.
sunny_hughes 5:11 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
Grants.gov
Recovery.gov
sunny_hughes 4:39 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
Tarren R. Bragdon served for five years as the Director of Health Reform Initiatives prior to becoming CEO of the Maine Heritage Policy Center in 2008. He is also a graduate of the University of Maine.
sunny_hughes 4:41 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
Want to know how much a Maine public employee makes? You can find that at maineopengov.org
jonippolito 4:54 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
One of my students created a Web site meant to expose these data more publicly, particularly about professors’ salaries at UMaine. But most of the buzz after his launch centered on the hockey coach’s salary 🙂
jolineblais 5:20 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
Question for Tarren: You just stated that you fundraise for your $1 million budget in order to help disclose money trails and payroll. Do you self-disclose this data? Do you provide information especially on who funds Maine Heritage Policy Center and who most uses the data? And what ‘meaning’ might be derived from this data? I’d be curious about this for InfoME as well.
sunny_hughes 4:52 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
Mark Woodward asks panelists where most of the traffic is on their sites.
sunny_hughes 4:54 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
Hokkanen says on Maine.gov the state agency directory is consistently a top hit. The weather is also very popular, as is job information. As far as online services: renewing your vehicle registration, the sex offender search, hunting and fishing licenses, etc. Citizen services are popular, but business services are heavily used.
sunny_hughes 4:55 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
Bragdon says that on maineopengov.org payroll information is most popular. Bragdon says that search capacity and database limitations prevent site users from knowing they can search for individual people within the records. The Maine Heritage Policy Center has created a blog to help users understand what kind of information is available.
sunny_hughes 5:01 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
COMMENT FROM GEORGE MARKOWSKY: He says he is trying to sensitize his students to the fact they have social responsibilities. “In the future transparency will involve many technical challenges and it’s important the new crop of students understand these responsibilities.”
sunny_hughes 5:18 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink
QUESTION FROM VIRGINIA NEES HATLEN, ASSOCIATE DEAN OF THE UMO COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES: There are enormous amounts of information and data, but there is a relatively small use of the sites for complex policy information. Users seem to be going for bits of data or “foxes in the hen house”… How do we get to information that is useful for citizens and taxpayers when we discuss policy issues? On one hand we have all this information and on the other hand we have soundbites. Is there a way to move more towards “meaning from data” in transparency?
Bragdon: We maintain a data set on how much government spends to companies. There is an independent group that also maintains this data. This allows users to compare data sets. It requires a sophisticated tool to allow users to perform searches. For us, it is a $100K project that has only been technologically possible in the last 18 months. It’s up to the users to create the information, we just want to give them a tool to extract that information beyond a tabular search.