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Urgent: demand real-time data feeds as part of bank bill
By WDavidStephenson | September 23, 2008
This is urgent, because of the scope and speed of the banking bailout legislation. I urge you to act on it asap.
I just blogged on the Huffington Post (a shorter version appeared here last week: I pulled it and submitted to Huffington because of its greater reach and clout) that there’s a methodology that could be implemented right away as part of the bailout legislation to assure that we don’t just have more regulation of the banking industry, but that it’s also “smart” regulation that is as current and dynamic as the lending practices that it is meant to regulate.
It involves implementing a requirement that the banks publish automated data feeds in formats including RSS, XML, etc. (if you’re not familiar with this, it’s similar to the feeds that you get when you subscribe to a blog. As soon as the data is generated, it can be published, automatically). Advantages would include:
- instantaneous reporting: in a global, interconnected economy that can be crippled so rapidly, as we’ve found out in recent weeks, does it make sense to have banks report quarterly? No!
- seamless: if the banks record their activities using formats such as XML (which they should just for efficiency’s sake in the 21st century) then reporting becomes automatic, with no additional steps required
- can serve as a management tool as well: the District of Columbia, the global pioneer in use of data feeds as a management tool, not only releases its feeds externally, but also uses them to create management “dashboards” that help run agencies more effectively, empower the entire workforce to deal with data (vs. just a select few managers), help identify causality and convergence, etc. Thus, governmental reporting is merged with management improvements!
- increase transparency, to build confidence: if the system is designed so that competitive data and any kind of identifiers are “scrubbed” from the data, the regulators can also choose to release the data publicly, allowing watchdog groups, the media, and Joe Public to monitor the overall health of the banking industry on a real-time basis. This step is controversial, and conceivably might lead to panic if people over-react to short-term trends, but it at least bears consideration.
Here’s where you come in: after you’ve read the blog post, if you believe my argument has merit:
- Please forward it to your friends
- go to http://publicmarkup.org/ — which is great example of transparency in action: allows public to mark up bill (let’s hope Congress will pay attention) and recommend that the law include mandatory data feeds
- contact your senators and rep. and ask them to demand data feeds in the bill.
You’ll thank yourself for acting on this….
Technorati tags: publicdata public data dataviz government transparency e-gov e-government 2.0 e-government transparent government e-democracy government IT government politics crowd-sourcing wisdom of crowds crowdsourcing smart mobs swarm intelligence emergent behavior mobile social networks collaboration Barney Frank Christopher+Dodd Henry Paulson banking finance economic crisis
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