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Posts Tagged ‘transparency’

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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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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Transparency and Finding Information on Government Web Sites

Posted in government, web communications, tagged , , , on 30 March 2009 | 5 Comments »

From the Sunlight Foundation -

Making Government Web Sites Searchable – A Vital First Step

Last week, U.S. Rep. Mike Honda Calif. guest blogged on O’Reilly Radar and asked, “how can Congress take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government?” That’s quite a refreshing attitude for a lawmaker to take, for sure. On top of that he acknowledged how Congress needs to adopt a dramatic shift in perspective before that need can be met. “Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.”

How cool is that? Transparency as the default setting!

But before we get ourselves too carried away… the rest of the post deals with government data that is already online, but is “not optimized to be found by search engines and thus, might as well not exist at all.” Further:

Google estimated that, as of 2007, about half of the content government agencies make available online doesn’t appear in search results at all due to how the Web sites are constructed.

Very true. Humbling also.

And there’s also the flip side of this — government sites with a built-in search capability that doesn’t work: often I’ll be searching for something on a government web site and I’ll be having trouble  finding it using the site’s built-in search function. So before giving up, I’ll try using Google, and presto! there it is.

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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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Visible Government: Canadian NGO to Host Mashup Challenge

Posted in collaboration, government, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , on 14 January 2009 | 1 Comment »

Back in November I mentioned the Show Us A Better Way contest over in the UK – a government sponsored project in the form of a coding contest to encourage innovation around how best to publish government information online.

At that time, I wondered aloud about where a Canuck equivalent might be. After all, I think this is a great idea with lots of possibilities – not least of which is the idea of making it easier to get at government info. Government websites are notoriously difficult to use. I have lots of trouble finding what I’m looking for most of the time — and I’m on the inside.

Well, it looks like a NGO by the name of Visible Government is taking up the challenge.

From a post earlier today on the Visible Government blog (sorry can’t get an exact link, their blog is a bit bizarre that way):

VisibleGovernment.ca hopes to soon be hosting similar contests for Canada. As part of our ‘Travel and Hospitality Expense Visualizer’ project, we’ve been collecting records on government Travel and Hospitality expenses from over 100 different federal departments. We hosted a coding event for this project in November, where we piqued the interest of several Montreal coders who have contributed their time. So far, we’ve collected over 30 000 records and counting. The Travel and Hospitality Expense DB is one data set that could be used for an open-government data mash-up contest in Canada. Others include:

  • the parliamentary voting records compiled by OurParliament
  • the parliamentary bill RSS feed, which is usually published by LegisInfo (but doesn’t seem to be available at time of writing.)
  • MP member info and other RSS feeds from HowdTheyVote

Are there others? If you know of any, please join the discussion at visiblegovernment-discuss, or mail them to me at jennifer@visiblegovernment.ca

There doesn’t appear to be a specific timeline for when Visible Government plans to get a Canuck government 2.0 coding challenge underway. It’s not clear either whether there would be any direct participation from government or whether the idea is to create strictly non-governmental mashups that pull government data sources.

More background: Visible Government describes itself as a “non-partisan grass-roots organization dedicated to promoting the planning, funding, and implementation of online tools for government transparency in Canada.” Sounds kinda like a Canuck version of the UK’s mysociety.org or OpenSecrets.org down in the US. Projects in the works (mostly in the planning stages right now) include ibelieveinopen.ca and sites for tracking public expense disclosures and access to information requests.

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