The IBM Center for the Business of Government asks Can You Hear Me Now? and offers three solutions to increase communication flowing from citizens to government: “first, we need to use all our available communications channels; second, we need to communicate in a way that the government can act on; third, we need to find the most effective government officials to talk to.”

There’s some great food for thought for both legislative and executive branches of government, be sure to spend some time with this post!

These days, it seems the default for new participation efforts involves going online. That’s great, but it is important to remember the benefits of offline participation too! Intellitics offers this blog post: Public Participation: Ten Simple Ideas for Better Online/Offline Integration, which is a good resource for anyone who would like to improve their agency organization’s participation strategy.

Go to the post for a full description of each idea, but here are the top ten:

1. Start from the beginning
2. Use online to promote offline and vice versa
3. Allow for each of the two channels to feed into each other
4. Make your online content available offline
5. Identify the “bumble bees”
6. Get the media to attend both online and offline activities
7. Bridge the digital divide
8. Synchronize online and offline activities
9. Encourage participants’ use of social media
10. Encourage higher-bandwidth modes of communication

And bonus number 11: Ask your participants

For the last few weeks, I have been receiving the White House Daily Snapshot in my inbox, a “a quick look at what’s happening each day with President Obama.  It includes the President and Vice President’s daily schedules, a look at what’s hot on the White House blog, the Photo of the Day and other important updates.”

Points to the White House for increasing transparency through email, something that many Americans interface with every day. I have learned about programs, successes, and events that I would not have heard about otherwise in a format that is easy to digest, and White House photos and video provide nice images of events that may not have been open to the press.

This is another example of a culture shift toward transparency and providing more information to the public. It would be great to see agencies pick up on this format as a way to keep interested people in the loop and hear about current events through direct contact from the agency and not another filter such as the media.

Interested? Sign up here to get the White House Daily Snapshot in your inbox.

This morning I was surprised to hear about a public engagement effort from a federal agency between songs on the radio. NASA is sponsoring a contest to vote on the songs astronauts will wake up to on the final missions of the Space Shuttle Program.

Now, is this a mission-critical meaningful form of citizen engagement? Not so much. But, it does engage people in NASA’s work who likely wouldn’t otherwise be, and probably helps people feel more connected to government/NASA. On the agency side, it is a sign of a culture that is thinking outside the agency about ways to involve citizens in their work in a variety of ways, which one can assume will lead to deeper engagement efforts around other areas of work.

So, on your next coffee break head over and vote on the wakeup song you’d like to be played, or if you’re feeling creative you can also submit an original song that will be later be voted on by the public and the two winners will be played during the mission scheduled to launch at the end of February, 2011.

I’m a big fan of good design in general – if something is visually appealing we are more likely to look at it and use it, and good design can also go far to make information accessible and meaningful. Yet, many government websites are not very easy to use and aren’t often particularly easy on the eyes, and there is a lot of government data out there that can tell a great story given the right platform. Enter Sunlight Labs’ Design for America contest. This spring, designers were challenged to “to make government data more accessible and comprehensible to the American public” through several different categories. See a video presenting the winners and links to all the winning designs on Adobe’s Government Bits blog.

All of the designs are worth checking out, but one of my favorites is the redesign of irs.gov by A Good Company and winner of the “Best Redesign of a .gov website” category. See the design and description of the design goals here.  Beginning with the agency goal, the designers built a website that provides an easier, personalized experience for taxpayers. While some features of this design probably fall more into the category of good government than open government, there is an emphasis on helping taxpayers understand why they pay what they pay, and how it is calculated. Government accountability is specifically cited as a feature: “Even though revenue from the income tax makes up only a small fraction of the money being spent by the government each year, it’s still a big deal for people to fork over a portion of their income. And if the American people are going to fulfill their tax obligations, the government has a responsibility to keep them informed on how that money is being spent.”

Kudos, this well-designed site could actually make paying taxes tolerable (gasp)! To hear more from the designers about their process, check out a video profile here.

{P.S. – This isn’t really news as the winners of the contest were announced at the end of May but nonetheless, worth drawing attention to!}

Last week the White House announced they have updated their dashboard to reflect progress made by agencies in their Open Government plans, with 18 agencies coming in all green to indicate that their plans meet every requirement in the Open Government Directive. The remaining 12 agencies have yellow marks in at least one area indicating progress toward expectations, and no agency was evaluated as failing to meet expectations (with what would be a red mark).

In the same blog post, the White House also announced that eight agencies are “the recipients of The Leading Practices Awards for achievement above and beyond the requirements of the Directive. These Awards recognize those agencies, as selected by their peers, that have outlined the best and most innovative strategies for promoting open government over the next two years.”

• Leadership, Governance, and Culture Change: Department of Transportation
• Transparency: Department of Health and Human Services
• Participation and Collaboration: Department of the Treasury;  Environmental Protection Agency; NASA
• Flagship Initiative: Department of the Interior; Department of Transportation; Environmental Protection Agency; General Services Administration (for Terms of Service Agreements and Open Government Public Engagement Tools); NASA; Office of Personnel Management

It’s good to see that there is still attention being paid to the Open Government Directive, and I’m glad to see that improvement is encouraged from the agencies original plans. I hope that there is good collaboration happening and that agencies are sharing their good ideas and plans.

Intellitics offers this review of a recent book: Open Government: Transparency, Collaboration and Participation in Practice, edited by Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. This books is now on my summer reading list!  A summary:

In a world where web services can make real-time data accessible to anyone, how can the government leverage this openness to improve its operations and increase citizen participation and awareness? Through a collection of essays and case studies, leading visionaries and practitioners both inside and outside of government share their ideas on how to achieve and direct this emerging world of online collaboration, transparency, and participation.
Contributions and topics include:

• Beth Simone Noveck, U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer for open government, “The Single Point of Failure”
• Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, “All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Liberating Government Data”
• Aaron Swartz, cofounder of reddit.com, OpenLibrary.org, and BoldProgressives.org, “When Is Transparency Useful?”
• Ellen S. Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, “Disrupting Washington’s Golden Rule”
• Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org, “By the People”
• Douglas Schuler, president of the Public Sphere Project, “Online Deliberation and Civic Intelligence”
• Howard Dierking, program manager on Microsoft’s MSDN and TechNet Web platform team, “Engineering Good Government”
• Matthew Burton, Web entrepreneur and former intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, “A Peace Corps for Programmers”
• Gary D. Bass and Sean Moulton, OMB Watch, “Bringing the Web 2.0 Revolution to Government”
• Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, “Defining Government 2.0: Lessons Learned from the Success of Computer Platforms”

Several times over the last few months we have mentioned here another project AmericaSpeaks is working on - AmericaSpeaks: Our Budget, Our Economy is a national discussion to find common ground on tough choices about our federal budget.  Americans from across the country will come together to weigh-in on strategies to ensure a sustainable fiscal future and a strong economic recovery.  As a part of this national discussion, on June 26, 2010, thousands of Americans across the country will participate simultaneously in an unprecedented National Town Meeting.

After months of preparation, June 26 is upon is, and it is going to be a sight to see! If you can’t join us in one of our 19 main sites or many many community conversation sites (find information here about participating), then you can check it out on Second Life or simply navigate to www.usabudgetdiscussion.org beginning at 11:30am Eastern time to watch and participate.

AmericaSpeaks: Our Budget, Our Economy will be an opportunity for people to truly engage, discuss, and make decisions together about the values and priorities important to them as Americans. I strongly encourage you to visit the website to:

• Read blog post by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, President and Founder of AmericaSpeaks about the unique national town meeting;
• See the “Federal Budget 101″ and Federal Budget Options Workbook participants will be using to guide their discussions and decisions;
• View a list of the diverse National Advisory Committee, the group of experts and advocates who advised AmericaSpeaks: Our Budget, Our Economy; and
• much much more!

If you haven’t seen it, the OpenGov Playbook is a must view for anyone interested in or working on open government. Lucas Cioffi is spearheading the website and the monthly OpenGov Community Summits. OpenGov Playbook is described as:

This workspace is for open government practitioners at the federal, state, and local levels to share questions and effective practices about the Open Government Directive (OGD).  Knowledge about the OGD is spread out across the Web; the purpose of this site is to serve as a useful directory to those resources.  If you have videos, blog articles, and other content on your website that is applicable to the Open Government Directive, you are welcome to links to the OpenGov Playbook in the appropriate place; this will provide more information for open government practitioners and bring more visibility to your blog.  Start at the Table of Contents.

As agencies have developed and implemented open government plans over the last few months, formal and informal networks have developed among the people working on similar issues. John Kamensky at the IBM Center for the Business of Government posted here and here about problem solving networks, well worth reading if you are finding yourself creating networks around open gov (or any other issue or challenge, frankly).