School of Information adjunct professor Eric Kansa and lecturer Raymond Yee will be presenting this week at a conference to develop a long-range vision for federal spending transparency. The conference, "Strengthening Federal Spending Transparency: A Working Conference to Develop a Plan of Action," will be held Thursday in Washington, D.C.
The conference will convene experts on federal budget and spending, government transparency, performance measurement, technology, as well as those affected by federal spending, to share ideas and solutions for how to comprehensively tackle the issues related to maximizing federal spending transparency. The conference will address issues of budgeting and financial accounting, reporting and disclosure, and performance accounting.
The deputy director for management from the White House Office of Management and Budget, Jeffrey Zients, will address the conference and kick off the event. Zients is the US Chief Performance Officer. In addition, the US Chief Information Officer (CIO), Vivek Kundra, will be participating in the conference.
Last fall, Kansa and Yee began lobbying for greater transparency in the government's recovery spending. They issued a much-discussed report with concrete recommendations on building web services for the government's Recovery.gov web site, along with adjunct professor Erik Wilde. "Access to data is only a first step towards achieving transparency," said Kansa at the time. "Our work... is a step toward more systemic thinking about how to achieve end-to-end transparency."
At this week's conference, Kansa and Yee will be discussing general principles for making federal budget and spending more intelligible and available to the public. Their preliminary report is "Improving Federal Spending Transparency: Lessons Drawn from Recovery.gov."
