Harlan Yu will present his preFPO on Friday April 22 at 2PM in the CITP Conference Room, 3d floor, Sherrerd Hall. The members of his committee are: Ed Felten, advisor; Jen Rexford and Beth Noveck (NYU Law School), readers; Mike Freedman and Matt Salganik (SOC), nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. ------------------------------- Title: Designing Software to Shape Open Government Policy Abstract: An open government is fundamental to democratic societies. Openness enables citizens to make well-informed electoral choices and to hold the government accountable for its actions, and it promotes trust between the government and its people. Modern advances in computing and communications technologies have transformed what it means for a government to be open and transparent. Governments today can instantly transmit large amounts of data directly to citizens, and citizens now have vast capabilities to process and understand this information. In this dissertation, we establish the basic principles for government's use of information technology to increase openness, by focusing on the publication of raw machine-processable datasets. We then discuss how the design of software can help guide the government toward these openness principles and eventually to changes in existing policies, processes or both. We consider two projects aimed at creating such changes at the federal level. The first project examines the closed nature of federal court records in the United States. We describe the RECAP browser extension, which we purpose-built to liberate court documents in a distributed and collaborative way, and show how its core design features were essential to its widespread adoption. We address the impact our tool has made on the policy discourse, as well as the limitations of this methodology to influence desirable policy changes. The second project looks at Congress and how the current legislative process significantly hinders software-enabled transparency efforts. We show how the maintenance of the United States Code is similar to-and distinct from-revision control of source code, and we discuss the implications of these differences. We demonstrate new software tools that can, in a limited setting, provide novel benefits to the legislative process, including automatic error-detection and more efficient bill drafting. Finally, we outline what Congress should do to facilitate the development of these new transparency tools.