When it comes to website/software features or technology choices, we tell ourselves things like "there are many more grandmothers in the world than nerds" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2389903) or "you're not the target demographic" or "you just don't understand what everyone else wants because you've got a technical bent" and "people don't want to use computers, they just want to get things done." But we still feel like we have a voice because we can speak with our capabilities and actually execute.

But when it comes to politics, where we recognize that our voices are small and we aren't empowered to do directly do anything and that what all the grandmothers want is going to overshadow what we want, we tell ourselves that we'd be able to affect change if only we got involved and became more political. Small voices have an uphill battle on trying to execute on political stuff.

If we have trouble communicating to people about what's important (or what should be important) when it comes to technology choices, we're going to have trouble communicating what's important (or what should be important) when it comes to things like government budgets or political positions. And I think we all recognize this. And that's why we're not politically involved and avoid discussing politics.

It's a waste of my time to have political discussions with almost everyone, it makes me feel bad about being a nerd and valuing things like rational discourse, the scientific method, and trying to being informed. I'd rather spend my time doing things that make feel good about being a nerd, and that's having discussions about technology things and not political things. Stereotypical technology discussions have the capability to advance the state of the art; stereotypical political discussions rarely advanced anything.

I think we also recognize that if you can't get people to take action on something obvious, such as that financing an expensive war machine is a massive waste and that we should spend more money on education, you're not going to have an easy time getting them to take action on something that's non-obvious. That being said, I think the value of transparency of government is obvious, but it's also hard to explain something that you find obvious to someone who doesn't also see that it's obvious.

I really don't view this as a partisan issue, although in some senses it is political.

The problem is that both political parties pay lip service to openness and transparency (although my partisan biases would claim one party favors this more than the other), the real difficulty is hold politicians to their promises in the face of the sausage-making of daily federal politics.

But, to quote Napoleon, never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. I'm more than willing to believe that this is being left out of a sense of benign neglect.

That this is being neglected is much more indicative of what Congress's actual priorities are. :(

I agree, I also don't see it as a partisan issue. Both parties have forward-looking people who understand the importance of transparency and the value it can bring to society -- and both parties have insiders who jealously guard information, pork experts whose main goal is to reward their campaign contributors, and some outright corrupt pols.