Government Bits takes A Different Look at Open Government Participation:

It’s been over a year, and, the evolution of Open Government is in full swing, including the definition of what Open Government is. We all pretty much agree that that OG is about transparency, participation and collaboration, but, what seems to be missing is context. Transparent to who? Participate in what? Collaborate to solve? So far, most of the efforts of the OG community have been focused on raw data sets and dashboards to answer for transparency, feedback collection sites to cover participation and various forms of social media to foster collaboration. Not a bad start, so long as we don’t allow the OG community to claim victory and quit looking for more creative innovations (or definitions of what OG could/should be).

To this point, I’d like to present a very different perspective on participation. As mentioned, generally, when participation is discussed with regards to OG, people are thinking about ways to gather feedback from or start a dialog with the public (or some subset of), typically focused on some government initiative or policy decision. Of course, this is generally a good thing, but, isn’t this an obvious use case for open government? So, let’s think outside the box for a minute and consider a whole different perspective, namely, finding ways to engage people directly with the mission of a particular agency. Still participation, right? Would this still be Open Government at work as well? I believe the answer is yes.

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.

The White House announced Version 1.0 of the Open Government Dashboard. “Version 1.0 of the Dashboard focuses on agency execution of the deliverables explicitly identified in the Open Government Directive.  It makes it easy for the American people to visually track progress on the deadlines to date.  The Dashboard also links to each agency’s Open Government Webpage, where the public can find more details on the steps taken to implement the Directive. Just look for the words ‘Evaluating our Progress.’”

Check out this OpenGov Tracker – it is a great quick look at the activity on agencies’ OGD pages using IdeaScale. You can easily see the number of ideas, comments, and votes by agency and in total – I’m hoping to see all those numbers grow substantially in the next 30 days!

Involve — the British public engagement think tank — is taking on a project to quantify the costs and benefits that are involved when agencies engage the public. They are looking for government agencies to volunteer to work with them to come up with a this assessment tool.

Here’s their recent message in full:

Involve are embarking on an ambitious project with Consumer Focus England, we are seeking to develop an equation for identifying costs and benefits associated with public engagement structures and processes. The proposed equation will be a practical tool, aimed at public sector workers who wish to make the case for effective engagement by exploring and quantifying the costs and benefits. It will also help authorities, civil society and the public to identify when public engagement is an effective use of public money.
We need to work with public sector organisations to test our equation, in order to ensure it is useful and that it is able to be applied in a variety of circumstances.

Do you have a recent example of a public engagement exercise? Would you like to help us with our research whilst having the opportunity to explore the costs and benefits of the exercise to your organisation? We are looking for volunteers to take part in the research. This will involve a number of depth interviews with key people related to the case study. You will gain a better understanding of the costs and benefits of your engagement, a better ability to articulate the business case internally and externally, and (if you so wish) will receive recognition for your support in developing new forms of measurement.
Specifically we are looking for case studies which:

• Can demonstrate some tangible improvements in service outcomes as a result of the engagement, for example reduced crime levels, improved health outcomes, lowered bureaucratic requirements, or more targeted spending.
• Have some understanding of the costs and benefits of the exercise
• Includes some element of engaging with members of the public
• Occurred within the last twelve months

We are also interested in looking at examples which engaged people in issues around cuts in expenditure

If you so wish we will ensure that interviewees and case studies remain anonymous, we will remove any identifying information from the reports and write‐ups.

If you think your engagement activity would make a good case study in this research, or if you would like to find out more about the project, please contact Emily Fennell e: emily@involve.org.uk t: 02079206478.

The Adobe Government Bits blog looks at Innovations in Citizen Interactions in the Most Unusual Places, starting with the popular BBC iPlayer and asking “Imagine your agency makes a change to a policy, procedure, form, program and you could push it to 3.5M people instantly? What if you could also figure out based on past actions which of the 3.5M people the particular update would be relevant for? What if you had a way to interact with those citizens not only this timely, but scaled and you weren’t then flooded with phone calls into your call center?”

Now jump to the Polish Ministry of Finance.  ”The Polish Ministry of Finance, in an effort to improve citizen interactions, led an e-Declarations project. At the core of the citizen interaction piece is a cross-platform, freely available client application which manages the electronic forms, pushes news alerts down and allows citizens to check the status of their filings.”

Even though I don’t speak a lick of Polish, the screen shots and accompanying description of the capacity and function of the website are worth looking at as a good example of a website that can easily be accessed by citizens for a needed/desired function.

As you’re probably aware, February 6 was the deadline for federal agencies to create an open government section of their website to “serve as the gateway for agency activities related to the Open Government Directive” and provide an opportunity for the public to provide feedback.  Here’s a roundup of some of the conversation about this second deadline:

From Sunlight Foundation: OGD/Open Pages Come to Life and Open Government Directive: Looking Forward

From Intellitics, Inc:  OpenGov Open Feedback Firehose

From Andrea DiMiao: Second Open Government Deadline: US Agencies Still Flexing Their Muscles

From TechPresident: Snow or No, Federal Agencies Get “Open” Pages Up in Time

John Kamensky on the The IBM Center for the Business of Government blog looks at Redefining the Role of Citizen in a Gov 2.0 World.

What does it mean to be a citizen in a Gov 2.0 world?  President Obama’s FY 2011 budget is being dissected for its shift in the size and scope of government.  But several initiatives in the budget, and things happening at the state and local levels, point to subtle — but significant –shifts in the role of citizens in their government.

Besides the oft discussed engagement of citizens in oversight and accountability, the following expanded or new roles for citizens are identified:

Increased involvement in dialogue

Being better informed about issues

Providing ideas and solutions

Being empowered by information to solving their own problems

Becoming involved in co-delivering public services

Becoming engaged in framing public decisions

Over time I’ll be watching how the role and perceived responsibilities of a citizen changes as more efforts are made to increase transparency and engagement, hopefully these roles are part of the future.