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Posts Tagged ‘open government’

A Surprise I Found in the GoC Communications Policy

Posted in government, social media, tagged , , on 27 September 2010 | 5 Comments »

What does this sound like?

Encourage public service managers and employees to communicate openly with the public about policies, programs, services and initiatives they are familiar with and for which they have responsibility. Openness in government promotes accessibility and accountability. It enables informed public participation in the formulation of policy, ensures fairness in decision making, and enables the public to assess performance. An open and democratic government implies that all employees have a role in communicating with the public while respecting the constitution and laws of Canada. Public service managers and employees must respect privacy rights, matters before the courts, national security, Cabinet confidences and ministerial responsibility. They serve the public interest best by communicating openly and responsively about policies, programs, services and initiatives they help to administer, while treating sensitive information with the discretion it requires.

A strong rationale for government bureaucrats to widely adopt social media communications, perhaps?  (Complete with caveats about doing so responsibly). Surprise — it comes from the Communications Policy of the Government of Canada.

Interesting: it looks like this has been part of the communications policy from at least 2002. Well before most of us had any idea about blogging, web 2.0 or social media. Go ahead, take a look at the text of the archived 2002 policy statement, it says the same thing.

(The GoC Communications Policy is a bit of a laundry list of requirements — 31 in total — for various aspects of communications: advertising, publishing, web, crisis communications, media relations, corporate identity, and so on. It’s easy to get lost in the details of each of these requirements and forget the overarching principles, laid out in the policy statement at the front end of the document. I’ve often skipped past this section — usually b/c I’m looking for some specific detail buried deeper in the document. But the other day I re-read the policy statement again for the first time in a long while, and that’s when this jumped out at me.)

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Moving Beyond “Open is the Answer”

Posted in government, tagged , , on 11 May 2010 |

For a long time, we’ve been hearing about “open government,” about how releasing more government data into the wild will help to solve deeply entrenched problems around government transparency and civic participation.

But it’s becoming clear that simply being open is not the answer. Maybe this is old news to folks who follow this more closely than I have been, but anyhow.

This crystallizes what I’ve seen seeing in a very succinct way:

Even the most idealistic geeks are beginning to understand that entrenched political and institutional pathologies — not technological shortfalls — are the greatest barriers to more open and participatory politics. Technology doesn’t necessarily pry more information from closed regimes; rather, it allows more people access to information that is available. Governments still maintain great sway in determining what kinds of data to release. So far, even the Obama administration, the self-proclaimed champion of “open government,” draws criticism from transparency groups for releasing information about population counts for horses and burros while hoarding more sensitive data on oil and gas leases.

And even when the most detailed data get released, it does not always lead to reformed policies, as Lawrence Lessig pointed out in his trenchant New Republic cover story last year. Establishing meaningful connections between information, transparency, and accountability will require more than just tinkering with spreadsheets; it will require building healthy democratic institutions and effective systems of checks and balances. The Internet can help, but only to an extent: It’s political will, not more info, that is still too often missing. [via Think Again: The Internet - By Evgeny Morozov | Foreign Policy]

Also, this presentation covers similar ground well — as the blogger states, “openness and transparency are not sufficient: they are the beginning of a virtuous civic-sense-building process which needs to be accompanied by other tools in order to have an impact.”

So we’re at a point where we recognize that releasing more government data will not in itself magically result in improved civic participation or greater transparency — rather opengov is at best one of many building blocks to help building healthy democracy and effective, accountable government. What then is the next step? How do we move beyond thinking that “open is the answer”?

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Government as a Platform

Posted in government, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , on 25 August 2009 | 5 Comments »

ReadWriteWeb – How Tim O’Reilly Aims to Change Government

The “government as a platform” idea is continuing to take root. Tim O’Reilly, Mr. Web 2.0 himself, has this grand vision for the US government:

“What I’ve learned from all these conversations,” O’Reilly says,”is about government as a platform. It’s not just social media use by government, or government using wikis. No, it’s something more profound. How do you think like a platform provider? We’ve moved our government from a lean vehicle for collective action, and over the last 200 years it has become so strong that it’s now 40% of GDP. I want to go back to the original vision of the role of government: a convener of things that we as individuals and companies can’t do alone. Standard setting, pilot programs; government providing enabling technologies for citizens to serve themselves.”

A big vision for sure — one that is sure to resonate with the hackers, developers and the transparency movement (Sunlight Foundation, MySociety, Visible Government etc.)

And he’ll be pushing it next month at the Gov 2.0 Summit in DC. (For those in Ottawa, he’s coming to GTEC in October to spread the same message.)

Drilling down — here’s a hint of how O’Reilly’s vision might look:

“… there’s an opportunity for government to say if people want to build services on this then we need the data we make public to be granular and timely. We should not be publishing updates once a month. Real time, local, responsive to users – those are new thinking for government.”

Indeed. But it’s clear that the US Government is receptive – moving ahead with initiatives like data.gov. The UK is also making strides in this direction.

But whither the Government of Canada? Are there any examples of our federal government moving in this direction? Is there an example of a GoC API out there? Some easy-to-use XML feeds? I’m not aware of anything. But then I’m just a lowly digital communicator…

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Yet Another Open Government Brainstorm Update

Posted in government, Web 2.0, tagged , , , on 4 June 2009 |

Things very multiball for me lately, so here’s just one further thought about the Open Government Brainstorm.

The brainstorm phase of the US consultation on open government closed on June 3. However, the folks managing the process decided to leave the site open to further contributions. But the site has now been overwhelmed with irrelevant and off-topic contributions — conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate, pleas to legalize marijuana, and so on. Yet during the official brainstorming period, site contributors remained more or less focussed on the task at hand — ideas on how to make government more transparent, collaborative and participatory.

My take-away? When a consultation is over, it’s over. The site should have been closed to further contributions on June 3.

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US Open Government Consultations — Update

Posted in government, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , on 26 May 2009 |

Update on the online consultations on open gov happening in the US, mentioned in my last post.

With a little more than one day to go, 590 ideas have been submitted, nearly 1000 comments have been posted, and over 20,000 votes have been cast.

To see the full list, ranked by vote, click through  to the Open Government Brainstorm – by IdeaScale.

The choice of using a third party site to host the consult is interesting — shows  a willingness to use what’s out there, rather than re-inventing the wheel.

And based on the branding of the consultation site, the management of the consult appears to be by an arm’s length think tank (the National Academy of Public Administration). To my mind this enhances the validity of the process — shows that the White House is letting the professionals manage the consultation process. (Or to be less charitable, doing it this way at least puts some distance between the administration and the consultation process. Which can mitigate the usual concerns about “government meddling” in this as it unfolds.)

In terms of the actual brainstorm, many of the ideas that have been proposed are vague and sweeping. That’s to be expected, so it will be interesting to watch how this unfolds in the second step in the consult, when “the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase.” Presumably the most compelling ideas are those that got voted up to the top.

Another interesting angle on this consult is that it’s open worldwide (as long you as you can participate in English), even though it is specifically about ways to improve the US government. What’s more, the consult was initially set up to allow anonymous contributions, although that was quickly changed:

Please note: On Saturday morning, we made a small change to this site. Posting, commenting and voting on ideas now requires users to log in. This change was made in response to concerns that settings that allowed anonymous posting may also have allowed users to vote more than once on the same idea. Our moderation policy can be accessed here.

(I see this change as a recognition of the limitations of current technologies to prevent voting up/down from being gamed, rather than an admission that allowing anonymous contributions is  an invalid approach.)

I find the worldwide/anonymous angle interesting as a more conventional decision would have been to limit input to American citizens, since the consult is about their how their government works. However, opening up the consultation to a worldwide audience shows a recognition that the best ideas about how to improve government transparency, participation and collaboration could come from anywhere–so why limit your options?

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US Open Government Initiative: Watch This Space

Posted in government, tagged , , , , on 21 May 2009 | 1 Comment »

On taking office back in January, one of the first actions of the Obama administration was to issue an “open government directive,” aimed at pushing the US government toward becoming transparent, participatory and collaborative.

The directive called for a set of recommendations for achieving “open gov” to be issued within 120 days. The deadline for this was today.

There doesn’t seem to be a set of recommendations that I can find. Instead, the public is being invited to co-create a set of recommendations. Go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/open to see.

Today we are kicking off an unprecedented process for public engagement in policymaking on the White House website. In a sea change from conventional practice, we are not asking for comments on an already-finished set of draft recommendations, but are seeking fresh ideas from you early in the process of creating recommendations. We will carefully consider your comments, suggestions, and proposals.

Here’s how the public engagement process will work. It will take place in 3 phases: Brainstorming, Discussion, and Drafting.

Beginning today, we will have a brainstorming session for suggesting ideas for the open government recommendations. You can vote on suggested ideas or add your own.

Then on June 3rd, the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase. On June 15th, we will invite you to use a wiki to draft recommendations in collaborative fashion.

These three phases will build upon one another and inform the crafting of recommendations on open government.

This will definitely be worth watching — and serve as a model for those curious about how governments can undertake online consultations.

Update: just hopped over to http://opengov.ideascale.com/ – this is where the actual brainstorming phase of this consultation is taking place – as of 3.25 pm EDT, there are already 18 proposed recommendations that have been voted on 206 times. Not bad for the first hour that this has been live.

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Open Sourcing Government, ChangeCamp Ottawa

Posted in collaboration, government, Web 2.0, tagged , , , on 16 February 2009 | 2 Comments »

Jennifer Bell of VisibleGovernment.ca posted up slides from her talk at the Social Media for Government conference at #ALI last week. Here they are.

I wasn’t able to see it in person, but it looks like it was a good overview of reasons why open sourcing Government makes sense. Points to examples – the Peer-to-Patent project and the Sunlight Foundation in the US, and FixMyStreet from mySociety.org in the UK.

The slides don’t specifically mention the ChangeCamp concept, but it is a clear parallel, happening here in Canada. ChangeCamp Toronto came off recently and was a great success, leading to some really interesting ideas.

During her talk, @thornley asked about bringing a ChangeCamp to Ottawa.

thornley @remarkk I just asked who is familiar with ChangeCamp. Only 2 @citymark and @cwightman. Is anyone organizing a changecamp in Ottawa? #ALI 11:55 AM Feb 10th from TweetDeck in reply to remarkk

thornley I’d like to help organize a #changecampOttawa. Who else is in on this? 11:58 AM Feb 10th from TweetDeck

And lo and behold, planning is underway. First meeting is at 6 pm tonight at the ClockTower. I’ll be there. Deets on the ChangeCamp Ottawa wiki.

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Goverati vs Carpetbaggers

Posted in bureaucracy, government, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , on 5 February 2009 | 2 Comments »

What with Obama-dot-prez taking power, and the excitement around the transition from change.gov to whitehouse.gov, followed quickly by the appearance of this executive order mandating increased government transparency and citizen participation in the Obama administration, lots of talk about 2.0 stuff in and around govt south of the border.

Key bit for me in the “Transparency and Open Government” memo:

I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.

Hmmm, my spidey senses are tingling… Now I don’t know a lot about how the US government operates specifically, but when I read about coordinating the development of recommendations for  “specific actions” for implementation of the Presidential memo, I can envisage bags of money being spent on building stuff, whether or not it is needed or useful. But which agency heads can point to as evidence that they are  meeting these objectives. (And of course, there’s the endless stream of strategy docs, breifing notes and business cases that justify the spend.)

This kind of situation usually means opportunities galore for consultants ….

In the best case scenario, there is an opportunity here for the ascendance of a new digitally-enabled class of government worker, supported by able and connected outside experts, to push Obama’s government 2.0 agenda forward. These are collectively dubbed the “Goverati” by Government 2.0 insider Mark Drapeau. Sounds very nice — Will it play out?

Or will the day be carried by what Geoff Livingston recently labelled government 2.0 carpetbaggers? And as Aaron Brazell added, “If You’re a Government 2.0 Guru, You have no Business in Government 2.0:”

They [these gurus] have appeared on the scene in recent months, read the blogs and brushed up on their government-fu. They probably come from traditional, and sometimes social media communications backgrounds. They have been working with small companies in the web space or otherwise, and expect the principles which have governed their trade to transcend the halls of Commerce, Agriculture, State and Defense. Therefore, they believe, they are experts.

Yikes!

Don’t get me wrong, I love the principles of transparency, collaboration and participation. It’d be nice to see the “Goverati” ideal play out. But I’ve seen how business gets done in the bureaucracy, too.  Yup, those spidey senses are tingling, alright.

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Government as platform vs Government as Web Publisher

Posted in bureaucracy, collaboration, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 11 June 2008 | 2 Comments »

Getting at the data

(Image source: Unhindered by Talent on Flickr)

My trusty Google Alerts on all things Govt 2.0 have been feeding me a steady trickle of reaction and reportage on a draft paper from scholars at Princeton which was released last month. In the paper the authors argue that the US federal government should pretty much get out of the business of maintaining websites and simply release the data.

In order for public data to benefit from the same innovation and dynamism that characterize private parties’ use of the Internet, the federal government must reimagine its role as an information provider. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

Typical reaction from the Web 2.0 set is along the lines of:

That’s a compelling vision of the future of open government, and one that makes a lot of sense. The idea is something like CSS — which separates the display code of a web site from the content. A government data platform would separate the content from the task of displaying it, which the commercial and non-profit spaces are likely better suited for than the government itself.

OK, well sure, makes sense that someone who’s got buckets of data that was publicly paid for (like Stats Canada, to take a Canuck example) should be making it freely available for others to use, for mashups or something similar.

This is basically the same argument that Hans Rosling makes with his Gapminder project and in this mind-melting presentation at TED from a couple of years back (presenting macroeconomics data like a sportscaster — wow!). He’s been working specifically with UN data, but the idea is still basically the same.

But to suggest that Govt should get out of the Web business altogether is absurd.

First off, there’s the privacy issue – lots of Govt data is about individual citizens. I’m not sure how well people would take it if their information was being accessed by marketers or advertisers who were able to freely connect to the social insurance database or the passport database. Think of the Facebook vs privacy controversy – and then up the angst by orders of magnitude. So while making some govt data more freely available is a good thing, there’s lots of data that the bureaucracy holds that really no one else should be able to get at. (But this isn’t really a Web publishing issue is it – it’s more about NOT publishing at all.)

More importantly, there are other compelling reasons for the existence of Government Web sites than just to provide a shell for their databases – like, well, gee, how about informing citizens about what Govt is up to? Don’t you want to know how your taxes are being used? Don’t you want to know how the government of the day is responding to issues or dealing with crises?

As a citizen, I’d be pretty miffed if I could no longer go to directly to www.parl.gc.ca to see what’s going on in Parliament. Sure, most of the time it’s a bore, and the really big news gets reported by the media and blogosphere, but I still like the idea that I can go there and see for myself what is happening — without any filter. And plus the protocol stuff is pretty funny.

Or what about getting access to government services – I would rather go to www.canada.gc.ca directly to find out how to apply for government services than have to check with a third party. And if I wanted to check on the status of my tax refund? Again I’m not sure that I’d want to go to a third party to see whether my cheque is in the mail or not (here’s an example where privacy and Web publishing come together).

Basically, framing the issue as an either/or choice doesn’t make a lot of sense for me. There is lots of room for both opening up govt databases for third party use and also to maintain a solid govt web presence.

Other reporting on this can be found here, here, here and here.

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