Godwin Named Director of New Media and Citizen Engagement
Friday, January 29th, 2010
Federal Computer Week reported last week that Beverly Godwin, the former director of USA.gov, has been named the Director of New Media and Citizen Engagement at the General Services Administration.
Hopefully Godwin and the GSA can play an important role in building the capacity of agencies to better engage the public and fulfill the goals of the Open Government Directive.
State of the Union: Updated
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
As analysis and summaries of the state of the union are published, we’ll try to gather here posts that pertain to open government and technology.
From TechPresident: Obama’s State of the Union ‘10, the techPres Abridgement
From Sunlight Foundation: Transparency Reforms on List of President’s Priorities and White House and Influence Reform Anew
From Federal Computer Week: Obama: Open Government Can Rebuild Public Trust
From OpenGovBlog: State of the Union Open Government Commitment – Earmakrs.gov?
And of courses you can check out responses to the speech via questions and comments posed to the President on YouTube.com/CitizenTube , twitter (#OFQ), and facebook.
Evolution of OGD
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
On Adobe’s Government Bits blog, Bobby Caudil comments on the evolution of the Open Government Directive, and hopes for further opportunities to engage with citizens, including through the ways in which all this newly public data is used and distributed:
“I am suggesting that by focusing primarily on data vs. human consumable information, the Open Government Directive is missing a great opportunity to engage directly with the general public. As a general rule, people do not engage with data, they engage with information presented in some format that is applicable to the topic, such as documents, videos, images or maps. As a citizen, not only am I interested in information gleaned from government data by 3rd party organizations, I am also keenly interested in hearing directly from my government. I truly hope that in the evolution to transparency our government does not loose its direct voice to us.”
Read the full post here: “Executing Open Government, an Evolution not a Revolution“
White House Publishes Senior Accountable Officers for OGD
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
The White House has published the list of Senior Accountable Officers required by the Open Government Directive to ensure that agency data made available to the public is accurate with regard to spending. The group largely consists of CFO’s with some CIOs and a few other interesting titles thrown in.
Transparency Camp East Scheduled for March 27-28
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Transparency Camp East has been scheduled for March 27-28 in DC at George Washington University:
“With mid-term elections around the corner, vast amounts of new data becoming available through the Open Government Directive and the seeds of a national campaign for transparency being planted, 2010 is a year that government transparency can become a national issue with all of us working on different fronts.
“And that’s what TransparencyCamp is all about. This un-conference will convene a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, journalists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent, accountable and meaningfully accessible to the public.”
Miller Challenges Obama to Give OGD More Teeth in ‘10
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
In a new Huffington Post article, the Sunlight Foundation’s Ellen Miller recapped the accomplishments of the Open Government Directive. Going forward, she challenged the White House to transform the plans and intentions that have been voiced in 2009 and put them into action:
“Clearly, President Obama took some strong steps to implement his promises to create more transparency, but again, they are still almost entirely intention and plans.
“To give those plans teeth and make them truly effective, they need to be codified mandates that can tangibly result in lasting transparency. It is imperative that the onus remains on the White House to fulfill their big promises, and incumbent upon the media and we as citizens to hold them accountable for doing so. That is the best way to ensure that government truly becomes more open.”
FOIA Lawsuits in Obama’s First Year
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
A Washington Post article today notes an increase in the number of lawsuits filed under the Freedom of Information Act in 2009, and despite commitment to transparency from the Obama administration not much has changed since the Bush years.
“Despite the administration’s opening scores of documents, court dockets show a slight increase in the number of lawsuits — 319 — filed under the Freedom of Information Act since Obama was sworn into office last January. In the final two years of the Bush administration, by comparison, there were 278 records suits filed in 2007 and 298 in 2008. People seeking records can sue only after the government repeatedly rejects their requests, usually after months of attempts and appeals.”
The White House refutes these claims: “Contrary to the Post’s assertions, the amount of litigation is already declining. The Department of Justice found that 22 fewer FOIA cases were filed in 2009 than 2008. And agencies are making more voluntary releases of information. The Department of Justice granted 13 percent more FOIA requests in part in 2009 than it did in the last year of the previous Administration, and granted 5 percent more in full than it did in the previous year. Those are meaningful increases that illustrate the impact of the Administration’s FOIA policy.”
Both articles speak to the bigger challenge of changing practices when it comes to openness and transparency in government, and hopefully we’ll see more progress with time.
“Is Information Good for Deliberation?”
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
On the academic side, the current issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation includes an article by Francesca Polletta, Pang Ching Bobby Chen, and Christopher Anderson titled “Is Information Good for Deliberation? Link-Posting in an Online Forum.”
The study looks specifically at how link-posting is used in online discussions, but starts with the question:
“Does information improve deliberation? Proponents of online deliberation argue that the availability of the Internet can solve two longstanding problems of citizen decisionmaking: that preexisting inequalities tend to be reproduced rather than minimized in deliberative forums and that citizen decisionmaking sacrifices the benefits of expertise. Because all deliberators online can access information during their discussion, deliberation should be more informed and more equal.”
To cut right to the chase, the authors conclude: “For now, we conclude by siding both with the champions and skeptics of online democratic deliberation. The availability of the web makes for deliberation that is not only more informed but also that is more fully connected to other forms of political action and that combines the virtues of intimacy with those of representativeness. However along with these advantages come dangers. Those who are experienced in using the web have an advantage in accessing information from it. The novelty of the web also accounts for the fact that it is difficult to assess the credibility of online information sources. Information in the Internet age is newly accessible but is also politicized in unfamiliar ways.”
For those using and thinking about online deliberation it is worth checking out the full article to read more about their findings including characteristics of link posting and online discussions.
Call for Obama to Adopt Civic Engagment Agenda
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
In a new article at Huffington Post, Peter Levine calls for President Obama to shift course to more deeply engage the public in the governance process. Levine argues that the Administration has strayed from the authentic civic engagement that helped to elected the president:
“All the diagnoses of what’s going wrong focus on top-down strategy: the Democrats are too arrogant or too cautious, they took too long or tried to rush too fast, or they focused on health care when they should have attended to unemployment. Now the advice from all quarters is to change legislative objectives and to craft a new “message.” This whole discourse ignores what could be the unique advantage of having a community organizer in the White House.”
Levine argues that “active civic engagement” challenges the public to partner with government to actively be part of the solution:
“Service and transparency are not nearly “edgy” enough; there is no fight in them. People are angry – from the Tea Partiers to MoveOn. When citizens try to solve serious social problems, they identify enemies. They do not just hold hands and serve together; they strike back at those whom they perceive as threats. “Active citizenship” reduced to non-controversial “service” or downloading government data completely loses touch with the legitimate anger of the American people.”
“The White House chose to make health care its major focus and included no aspects of civic engagement in the deliberations about the bill, in its advocacy for the legislation, or in the design of the statute. There could have been real public discussions, instead of sham “Town Meetings” that were really speeches by politicians with time for Q&A. Progressive volunteers could have been encouraged to conduct face-to-face dialogues in their communities and to form relationships with one another (instead of merely finding themselves on the receiving end of an email list). The legislation could have included health co-ops as an experiment in engaging citizens in policy.”
“It is probably too late to try a civic approach on health care. Climate change is so obviously stuck in the Senate that it is the issue I would use. The inside game can’t work. Since negotiation cannot yield an acceptable bill, the administration should try a grassroots strategy that includes a genuine element of open discussion, not just “messaging.” And the legislation should include strong support for citizens’ work (not just volunteer service) to reduce our carbon emissions.”
Impressions on data.gov Data Sets
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Andrea DiMaio made some interesting observations as agencies posted raw data last week to data.gov including that “there is no explanation of what makes certain data sets high-value.” “The second interesting aspect is that no ‘tool’ has been submitted in this round. Data.gov ‘tools’ are agency tools or web pages that can be used to mine data sets. Clearly, as the Directive asked for raw data, this is what Data.gov got. But the submission of some extra tools would have helped determine an agency’s view about the value of that data and would provide some starting point to figure out what to do with that data.”
While three high-value data sets were required by the Open Government Directive, among the agencies there is quite a bit of variation in the number of data sets posted and how many of them are designated high-value.
What are your first impressions of the data sets submitted by the agencies?
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