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”

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!

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.

“West Wing Week” is a weekly collection of video clips, providing a look at the activities of the White House in the preceding week. In the open government world, there’s some discussion about how open this video series actually is, even in this AP article about the series:

Kathleen Jamieson, an authority on political communications at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center, says the videos allow the White House to give the impression of openness.

“That’s the value of it before you’ve ever looked at the substance,” she says.

The Washington Post also discusses it: “White House video blog offers and inside view”, discussing among other things the relationships between media and the White House, and how “West Wing Week” fits in with broader coverage of the White House:

White House officials deny that they are attempting to end-run reporters. In fact, they say such initiatives as “West Wing Week” are evidence of greater candor. “These videos are just one part of the president’s effort to have the most transparent White House in history,” said Nick Shapiro, a spokesman, who added that “West Wing Week” “is yet another way for people to get a better sense of what’s happening at the White House and why.”

Is Government Broken? Strengthening Democracy through Election and Governance Reforms

In a recent CNN/Opinion Research survey, 86 percent of Americans said they believe the federal government is “broken.” In the last year, governance challenges complicated the nation’s capacity to address issues such as the economy, health care, climate change and financial regulation. As obstacles to governance continue to mount, what reforms need to be implemented to ensure that the United States is equipped to face its short- and long-term policy challenges? Is government broken? And if so, how do we fix it?

On June 1, the Brookings Institution, Demos, AmericaSpeaks, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University and Everyday Democracy will host a forum to explore current challenges to good governance and to discuss ways of creating and strengthening a strong, vibrant and inclusive democracy, focusing mainly on proposed solutions to reform our governance, election and campaign finance systems. The first panel will focus on how electoral and campaign finance systems can be reformed. The second discussion will center on improving institutional performance, administrative infrastructure and governance processes to better address the nation’s most pressing policy problems.

After each panel, speakers will take questions from the audience.

When

Tuesday, June 01, 2010
1:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Where

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Participants

Welcome and Introductory Remarks

Miles Rapoport

President, Demos

Darrell M. West

Vice President and Director, Governance Studies

Panel on Election and Campaign Finance Reform

Eddie Hailes

Managing Director and General Counsel, Advancement Project

Clarissa Martinez De Castro

Director, Immigration and National Campaigns, National Council of La Raza

Nick Nyhart

President and CEO, Public Campaign

Norm Eisen

Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform, The White House

Moderator: Karen Hobert Flynn

Vice President for State Operations, Common Cause

Panel on Governance Reform

Thomas E. Mann

Senior Fellow, Governance Studies

Martha McCoy

Executive Director, Everyday Democracy

Gary Bass

Executive Director, OMB Watch

Moderator: Archon Fung

Associate Professor, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University

Closing Remarks

Carolyn Lukensmeyer

President, AmericaSpeaks

E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Senior Fellow, Governance Studies

The co-chairs of the caucus are Representative Darrel Issa (R-CA) and Representative Mike Quigley (D-IL). According to Rep. Quigley’s website, the caucus “will serve as a resource for Members of Congress on bipartisan open government initiatives. The caucus will promote legislation that requires federal information to be freely accessible, as well as advocate for new initiatives that support transparency.”

The principles of the Transparency Caucus can be found here (pdf).

What if House leadership from both parties agreed to collect input from the American public in a real and meaningful way? Background information could be provided so people could make an informed decision among several viable options, and Congressional leaders could agree to seriously consider, if not outright approve, the citizen input. This wouldn’t necessarily allow members of Congress to shirk their responsibility to tough decision making. Rather, it could enhance opportunities to fulfill another duty – to represent the wants and needs of constituents, doing so through another method of engagement than the more typical emails/letters/phone calls to Congressional offices from people who feel most strongly about a particular issue.

What do you think? Is this a legitimate step toward open government and engagement, or just a partisan gimmick?

Nancy Scola at TechPresident also offers In Defense of “YouCut”, discussing other aspects of YouCut including quotes from Minority Whip Eric Cantor’s new media director about the program.

“As government agencies at all levels bring their services online, Americans are turning in large numbers to government websites to access information and services. Fully 82% of internet users (representing 61% of all American adults) looked for information or completed a transaction on a government website in the twelve months preceding this survey.”

Many of these visits were information seeking or transactional (activities like paying fines, renewing a license). Both these activities are no doubt important, but there is opportunity here to capture true engagement online between citizens and government – not just a one way flow of information, but an opportunity for meaningful, two-way conversation about the policies and processes that affect people where they live and work. And, the internet can’t yet be the only focus for government interaction -  “Americans tend to interact with government using a mix of online and offline methods. Internet users prefer contacting government online, but the telephone remains a key resource for government problem-solving.”

This study also draws attention to demographic differences in the populations accessing this information – “high-income and well-educated internet users are much more likely to use government services and information online,” and there are also racial differences in accessing government online to be mindful of.