California could use a concert hall like Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie.

The signature structure of 21st century Germany sits atop an old pier above a dramatic bend in the Elbe River. Its creative design features performance space for the philharmonic, a dramatically curved escalator, and a dozen different public spaces for people to gather and enjoy spectacular city views.

But what California needs more than this stunning new piece of architecture is the scandal that built it. Originally planned in 2007 as a 186 million Euro project, financed with 77 million Euros from taxpayers, the Elbphilharmonie was so dogged by delays and overspending that its final price tag approached 1 billion Euros, with taxpayers paying 789 million.

The good news: The concert hall, as a fiscal embarrassment, inspired a furious public reaction that in turn produced one of the world’s most advanced government transparency laws.

And that law, unlike the hall, can be transported to California, where our transparency rules mostly produce frustration.

In California, the onus—and much of the expense—of getting access to government papers and people is put on citizens, who have little leverage to force governments to comply. Our open records laws often force citizens to identify records and bear the burden and expense of requesting documents, fighting for access, and obtaining copies. And because of deep mistrust between California’s people and our governments, our open meetings laws involve putting restrictions on the power and discretion of our government representatives—we dictate when they can meet, when they can talk to each other, when they can email one another.

As a result, California’s law, by limiting the power both of citizens and their government officials, actually empower wealthy players outside government, especially developers and unions, because they are not limited by the same restrictions as government officials.

Hamburg’s transparency law works differently because it empowers everybody, both citizens and government officials. The law sets a default of openness by requiring government officials to make their documents—contracts, memos, deliberations—viewable on the internet, almost as soon as they produce them. Citizens in Hamburg—or anyone really, anywhere in the world— can access records simply by going online and searching through an online portal.

I learned about Hamburg transparency on a recent visit to the port city, where I was the guest of local journalist Angelika Gardiner and farmer Manfred Brandt, who let me sleep in his barn. I’d gotten to know the two of them in recent years while serving as co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, a network of journalists, scholars, activists, and election around the world.

For those who work in the Rathaus, the seat of Hamburg’s state government, transparency is automatic and immediate. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Twenty years ago, Gardiner, Brandt, and other citizens began using direct democracy to reshape the constitution of Hamburg, which is both a city and one of Germany’s 16 states, giving it a special double status. They wanted to bring transparency to Hamburg government, which used opaque public-private contracts for many building projects. Germany’s federal freedom of information law, which like California laws put the onus on citizens to identify and seek records, wasn’t very effective.

Elbphilharmonie’s cost problems offered an opening. In 2011, using photos of the construction site with the slogan “Transparency Creates Trust,” several groups—from Transparency International to the Chaos Computer Club to Brandt and Gardiner’s More Democracy—drafted a ballot initiative to establish a transparency law. Their idea was to create an information register online where the government would have to publish all its documents; citizens could then search it anonymously, free of charge.

Modeling the sort of government they sought, they used a public Wiki to develop their ballot initiative for transparency. A retired supreme court judge helped complete a legally sound draft on an unpaid voluntary basis. Such an open drafting process is uncommon in California’s more corporate initiative process, which is dominated by wealthy individuals, massive interest groups, and professional political firms.

The initiative was a sensation. After the groups gathered 15,000 signatures to put their measure on the ballot, the Hamburg parliament, bowing to the inevitable, adopted their proposal before a public vote could be held. The law went into effect five years ago this month, in October 2012.

It took until 2014 to get everything online, but the Transparenzportal is now a treasure trove—contracts, reports, plans, grant awards, proposed resolutions, spatial data, permits, even payments and benefits for senior officials are available for your perusal.

The law guarantees “immediate” access, which usually means documents must be published within a week of their creation. About 60 percent of the documents involve permits and decisions around buildings of some sort. In the last two years, the portal has been accessed nearly 23 million times.

The transparency has not been total. Smaller contracts (those less than 100,000 Euros) aren’t always published online. An expansive exemption for personal privacy requires redaction of some information that would seem relevant—at least to this cynical Californian—for holding local officials accountable. And some companies that do business with Hamburg have fought disclosure, arguing that the aggressive transparency forces them unnecessarily to disclose trade secrets.

But an evaluation of the law, required after five years, concluded that things are working as intended. Among the most intriguing findings: Hamburg’s government officials, who once worried about transparency’s costs, are now some of its biggest fans. Indeed, while citizens do use the law (and large majorities in surveys say the transparency has enhanced political participation), some of the most aggressive users of the transparency are Hamburg officials trying to figure out what people in other departments are doing. In this way, the transparency law may be most effective as a force for efficiency within the government, breaking down bureaucratic silos. The links hand now knows what the recht hand is doing.

That’s the lesson of Hamburg: With ordinary people so consumed with their own work and lives, the best check on government abuses and corruption are city officials themselves.

On a visit to the Rathaus, I asked Andreas Dressel, who leads the governing Social Democrats in the Hamburg parliament, how the transparency law might be adapted for a California city. “The best thing to do is to translate it into English—and put it right directly into your law,” he said proudly, and added, while noting the Trump administration’s chaos, “You need it not just in California but for the entire United States.”

Dressel may have been exaggerating, but the merits of a switch to Hamburg-style transparency are apparent. A law that makes disclosure an automatic online default should be more effective than California’s records and meetings laws, which are all but designed to create conflict between public demands for access and government desire for secrecy.

Such transparency would jumpstart the nascent open data movement, which has seen the state and some cities put up data sets so that tech-savvy citizens can help solve government problems. And it’s not hard to see how a transparency law might make government responses to crises faster and more effective.

In San Diego, officials in different city and county departments failed to communicate effectively for months earlier this year as a deadly hepatitis epidemic spread, according to the nonprofit Voice of San Diego. If officials could have seen their separate work and information online, it’s quite possible that a fuller response—which included a declaration of emergency—might have come earlier and saved lives. So far 17 people have died.

Of course, such transparency would be opposed by government contractors, public employee unions, and the local governments over which they exert too much control. But it is for situations like this that we have direct democracy in California. And in Hamburg.

The post The Delicious Transparency of the Hamburgers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Those days are over. Today, the light is scarier than the dark ever was.

It’s not just because the sunshine is so much hotter and longer now that California feels as if it’s drying up. It’s not merely that our days are so busy with traffic and meetings that, if you want to get anywhere or get anything done, you have to travel or work at night.

What’s scary is that Silicon Valley rules us now, and all the lights it shines never really turn off.

They are the lights of the smartphone and the tablet and the router, keeping us up with their glow. They are the lights of our digital appliances, informing their manufacturers about the details of our consumption. And they are the lights of connection, of social media, luring us to share and read and step into the light of a community, when we’d be better off exercising or resting or talking to friends or making love.

And they are the lights of transparency, that new god. The best companies are transparent. We must be transparent in our dealings. We demand that our governments be transparent. We, they, all pledge to be so—let the light shine everywhere.

But we pledge transparency so often we’ve turned it into a club. Politicians dump bad news in big batches on Friday afternoons and lawyers dump boxes and gigabytes of records on their opponents, hiding their needles in the haystacks. We obscure the important civic details in 271-page California budgets and delta conservation plans that run to 34,000 pages.

And woe to anyone who doesn’t disclose—you must be hiding something! Let’s convene a grand jury or a legislative hearing. Or file a ballot initiative to force disclosure. Of course, we all know it won’t end there. Transparency can pull things into the light, but it can’t make us trust each other.

It’s scary how much we can see now. At the same time, there is so much out in the light that we can’t see it all. So we struggle to prioritize what’s most important. And it’s downright frightening how hard it is to tell, in all that light, what information is correct and what’s perilously wrong. There’s too much dangerous stuff out there in the light where credulous people can see it. And so they might believe that immigrants are criminals or vaccines threaten children or that having a gun in the house makes you safer.

Remember the Night Stalker? Remember when danger came with crime or violence or drugs in night? Well, murders and violence are less common, and drugs are on their way to being legal. Now we most fear exposure, the scary reality that no matter how careful we are, all our personal information is out there for someone to grab. Identity theft is the crime of these sun-splashed times.

It’s not only the bad guys who can get you in the light. It’s the good people, too.
They want to give us fair warning of everything, and so our lives have endless forms to fill out, boxes to check, labels to read, means of confirming that we have acknowledged what they are disclosing. All those warnings are supposed to reassure us, but too much sunlight can be frightening and blinding.

If we miss anything, if we forget anything, if we read too fast—well, it’s our own darn fault, isn’t it? And so we toggle back and forth between all the screens and lists and emails we’re supposed to monitor, anxious that we’ll miss some message we’re not supposed to miss.

Online communities grow like weeds—every organization and hobby has one. In my own life, with a wife and three kids and a 21st-century job that’s really five different jobs, I’m supposed to be signed into and contributing to a couple dozen permanent online huddles—for preschool and elementary school and the after-school program and Little League and two different soccer teams and my main work (with its different email lists) and a global democratic forum I run on the side and the university where I teach.

And so someone is always mad at me, telling me I missed this message, or that I didn’t respond to something or that I communicated to the wrong list. And sometimes I’m the one who is mad at someone for missing my messages. People see all your failures in the light.

Outside my laptop, the light is invading the dark in California. Ten years ago, I’d drive at night up the coast on the 101 or through the Central Valley on the 99, and you could go for miles and miles in the pitch dark. Today, there are lights everywhere.

One recent dark day earlier this month on my way to Fresno, I pulled off the 99 and wandered into Wasco, a small town that was briefly famous last Halloween for “the Wasco clown,” a scary clown who showed up in places and spooked people. But then the whole thing went on social media, and hordes started looking for the clown, and pretty soon there were copy clowns and arrests of said copy clowns all the way down to Bakersfield. When I asked people in Wasco about the clown, they said they wished it had just stayed a small little local thing.

But the light swallows up everything, even Halloween. Remember when costumes were black and covered your whole body? Today—call me a prude, if you like—the nurses and witches expose so much skin there’s nothing left to the imagination.

With the light revealing so much, I take comfort in the dark now. I bet you do, too.

The dark doesn’t cause sunburn or skin cancer. The dark allows you to think and maybe, if the weather is right, search the sky for a few stars.

My favorite moments now are when I leave the mobile phone at home and steal away for a short walk after the kids have gone to bed. At work, I treasure sneaking out to lunch for a few minutes without telling colleagues where I’m going. I love hiding in the shady corners of theaters and coffee shops where I can feel safe from the light, in dark anonymity, for just a moment.

I hope you find some dark place like that during this very bright and big Halloween weekend.

I hope I don’t you see there.

The post The World Needs More Darkness appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.