Andrea DiMaio observes that Open Government Ideas Look All the Same: Are You Surprised? The most popular idea in 12 agencies, and in the top 10 for all but one agency, is for live webcasts of agency meetings.

I do not want to sound too cynical, but – as I said in a previous post – this engagement mechanism rewards the usual suspects: both those who have a genuine passion for open government like the NASA Ames Research Center employee who is fond of the OpenSocial portal, and those who may just be playing the system, like the rather mysterious proponent of webcasts for all agencies.

I do hope that open government enthusiasts will learn from this first experience and realize that they need a tighter connection between the idea collection process and the nature and mission of individual agencies. I suspect that some level of orchestration would make the whole initiative far more effective, figuring out earlier rather than later what are the few really original ideas.