This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 12, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Candidate and Senator Obama supported some good ideas for improving the transparency of the federal government, but what will a

president Obama do to reverse course after one of the most secretive

administrations in recent decades? Ed Felton is professor of computer science and public affairs and director of the Center for

Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.

He says moving toward more open and mashable federal data could yield benefits not yet envisioned by anyone.

During the campaign, President-elect Obama took pretty seriously this whole increasingly popular term transparency for government and

sponsored a key piece of legislation that improved transparency in federal spending, how seriously should we take his pronouncements thus far

about actually opening up the government to a lot more digging around by the public.

I think we should take them very seriously.

We're seeing in the transition now signs of openness that we haven't seen in the past.

Information being disclosed about meetings between the transition team and outside groups,

documents that are submitted to the transition are being put up on the net

and not only published but also accompanied

with comments from the public.

So we are seeing more transparency in the transition and I'm very hopeful that when the new administration takes office that this will continue.

Now this is not a selfless activity, I'm sure.

What do you think that it is that they are seeing about the benefits of transparency to the administration itself and their own

stability of their authority by engaging in such a such an open process.

Well in some ways it it continues what they were able to do during the campaign where they

made a lot of people feel like they were playing some role in the campaign, not just

...