MIT Government Transparency Project

Shedding light on local democracy using Big Data

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How transparent is your local government?

How does your town spend taxpayer money? Can you find out what your representatives discussed at town council meetings? How does your town's transparency compare to other local governments?

At MIT GOV/LAB , we've used predictive modeling to assign transparency scores to local governments across the United States. While most will agree that government transparency is important, measuring transparency for a large number of governments can be costly and time-intensive. Using big data methods , we were able to grade thousands of town websites on whether they contain basic information about how your government operates.

Questions? Contact us at govt_transparency@mit.edu .