Hey There! RITreasury is Using Twitter!

April 7, 2009 at 3:00 am PT

Twitter accounts are like… opinions: Everyone’s got one. Even Rhode Island’s Office of the General Treasurer, which recently announced plans to Twitter the state’s daily cash flow in real time. “As we look forward, it’s important that government find innovative ways to use existing technology to communicate with the public and increase government transparency,” R.I. General Treasurer Frank Caprio explained in a statement. “Utilizing Twitter is the next step. As our State’s fiscal crisis escalates, our legislature must make the difficult choices to balance our budget. I hope that this latest effort will serve as a daily reminder to how urgently we need action.”

Sure. Assuming Caprio can convince the state’s Twittering citizenry to actually follow “RITreasury.”

With updates like:

“Real-time cash-flow numbers for Friday, April 03: General Fund Receipts: $28,535,335 … General Fund Expenditures: $31,461,897,”

that could prove more difficult than resolving the fiscal crisis…

Tagged with: budget, cash flow, expenditures, fiscal crisis, Frank Caprio, General Fund, government, John Paczkowski, legislature, Office of the General Treasurer, receipts, Rhode Island, transparency, Twitter

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http://blog.macb.net Mac Beach

Seems rather silly doesn’t it?

Why not something unambiguously parsable like an XML string?

What if they later decide to add a third number to the data, and all the old entries won’t be compatible?

Why not a shared Google spreadsheet?

I’m all for government transparency, and we have far too little of it these days.

But grand summaries are too subject to politicking. I’d rather see raw numbers. Let us see where every penny is spent, and let media and citizens do their own aggregating.

Obama promised to use a scalpel to cut government waste. He, and the media, seem to have forgotten about that, preferring instead to do surgery on GM.

Maybe some states can set an example of how it can be done. Give citizens enough information about HOW the money is being spent and I’m quite sure the scalpels will materialize.