Open government consultancy Delib have just released a short film documenting the first 12 months of President Obama’s Open Government initiative.  It features interviews with key players and commentators involved in the Open government movement.

Interviewees range from the White House’s deputy CTO for Open Government, Beth Noveck, to Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media.

The documentary was shot by Delib founder Chris Quigley over two months last year, on location in Washington DC and via Skype.

Beth Noveck on the importance of the Open Government memorandum:

The reason the Open Government memorandum was the very first executive action the President took…setting forth the three central values of Transparency, Participation and Collaboration by which we define an Open Government, is because it’s really central to the governing philosophy and vision of the administration. It’s important to us, not only because openness is the right way to go, but also the best way to run and effective and efficient government.

For more details on the film, check Chris Quigley’s interview on Federal News Radio and delib.co.uk/opengov

The movie was created before the Open Government directive was released. For more on the status of the directive, check ProPublica’s Transparency tracker.

At last week’s Web 2.0 Expo Tim O’Reilly interviewed Beth Noveck (Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government) on how the Open Government initiative was progressing throughout Federal, State and Local Government. Noveck explained how President Obama’s vision of a more transparent, participatory and collaborative government is manifesting itself through new Web 2.0 platforms and services.

Her role as Director of the White House Open Government Initiative means she’s actively involved in promoting openness and citizen engagement throughout Government. She’s also focused on creating a Government as a Platform ecosystem, in which applications can be developed by outside parties through the use of raw data feeds and APIs . In the conversation she expands on the progress so far and references many of the interesting initiatives exemplifying the tenets of Open Government.

The vision

The conversation begins with Noveck outlining how committed the President is to bring innovation to Government and using technology to do so. He acknowledges that technology has an important role to play in making Government more transparent, accountable and efficient. Signaling his intent to reforming Government, the first thing he did after his inauguration was to sign the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. He has also appointed a Chief Information Officer in Vivek Kundra and a Chief Technology Officer in Aneesh Chopra, to ensure Government utilities innovative technologies in the pursuit of the tenets of Open Government.

The Successes

Questioned on what is going well Noveck highlighted the exciting cultural shift in how Government participates and collaborates with the public. The most important success is that people in Government are taking about openness, transparency and citizen engagement. These terms have entered the lexicon of Government and are slowing becoming embedded into conversations around public policy and how to solve the major issues facing the country.

It’s important for people to be able to contribute to policy making from the outset, rather than providing them with the ability to comment on policy when it’s about to be voted on. She notes the structure of the Open Government initiative where citizens were asked for their ideas from the start. The public was then invited to discuss these ideas and subsequently to participate in formulating the recommendations for the Open Government directive.

Noveck noted the challenges around Open Government concern empowering people to take risks and ensuring the collaboration/participatory tools are readily available to allow them implement their ideas effectively. Legislative concerns around the use of new technology are being addressed through agreements with Web 2.0 providers, while policy barriers will be addressed with the release of the Open Government Directive later this year.

Saving money, Improving efficiency and Going green

Noveck mentioned several crowdsourcing initiatives as examples of how Open Government tenets can be used to improve how Government operates.

The Federal Government’s SAVE Award was mentioned as an example of how Government can harness the ideas and intelligence of its employees to reduce costs and improve efficiencies. During the three weeks of the competition Federal employees suggested about 38,400 ways to make the Government more effective and efficient. The winning idea will be announced by the President later this month.

Another initiative similar is the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Innovation Competition. Noveck noted how the competition solicited ideas from Federal employees on how to reduce the backlog of Veteran benefits claims and improve processing times. On announcing the competition in August President Obama said: “We’re going to fund the best ideas and put them into action, all with a simple mission: cut those backlogs, slash those wait times, deliver your benefits sooner”. The competition has already received over 3,000 ideas with the top 5 projects receiving full funding for development and execution.

The GreenGov Challenge was also highlighted as another manifestation of the President’s Open Government initiative. This competition challenged Federal employees to submit their own clean energy ideas and vote on others. The competition ran for two weeks in October and solicited 5,314 ideas from 14,139 employees.

These competitions have all harnessed ideas from those working at the front line of Government. Noveck wants to tap into the expertise and intelligence of the American people, and not just those on advisory committees:

We want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to advise government

Expert labs and Data platforms

The concept of Expert labs was discussed as a means helping ‘policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government tap into the expertise of their fellow citizens’. These ‘do-tanks’ can be used to support and nurture new technologies to answer the big questions facing policy makers. They do this by helping ‘to strengthen the ability of groups to solve problems, make decisions, resolve conflict and govern themselves by designing software and legal code to promote collaboration’.

Making Government data accessible in machine readable format is an area in which Noveck is passionate about. She wants to develop an ecosystem in which citizen developers create applications based on Government data. She believes ‘data transparency is the most interesting and exciting thing in the world’. While accepting not everybody is interested in raw data feeds (such as those available on data.gov), they are important for developers as they make it possible to build new applications that would, or could, not be built by Government alone.

She identified the recently released raw data catalog from Massachusetts, as an example of how just releasing data can inspire others to create exciting new applications. Less than 48 hours after the state Department of Transportation released real-time data on the location of MBTA buses, a developer created a Google map mashup showing bus locations. A spokesman for the Department said:

“We think it’s great. It’s exactly what we hoped people would do with the data: think creatively,”

States as Laboratories for Democracy

In a blog post on Open Government Laboratories of Democracy, Noveck quotes Justice Louis D. Brandeis in 1932:

“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system, that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

She believes that the Federal Government can learn from State and Local experiments in transparency, participation and collaboration. Already, many states and cities have open data catalogs (e.g. Utah,   Washington, DC, San Francisco and New York) that provide the public with access to information from and about Government. As a result of these many third-party applications have been developed by non-governmental individuals and companies. The San Francisco and Washington DC App stores are high profile examples of ecosystems that can develop when data is released in accessible formats and citizens are encouraged to remix it through new applications.

Noveck’s Open Government Innovations Gallery will help promote these initiatives as best practice examples for other states to follow. The National Association of State CIOs is embracing this movement and helping to promote greater data transparency at State level. It recently published Guidance for Opening the Doors to State Data to further the release of Government data for the purpose of transparency and reuse by the public.

Apps.gov

Noveck mentioned Apps.gov as the platform through which cloud computing applications can be shared throughout Government. Rather than having 30 different brainstorming applications Government can agree to concentrate on a few platforms, thus enabling experiences and best practices to be easily shared amongst agencies. Free and paid-for applications can co-exist, with agencies choosing which is appropriate for their needs.

Submitting an application for Apps.gov, however, still requires companies and individuals to go through GSA’s Schedule Program. Tim O’Reilly highlights how Government procurement needs to be reformed in order to enable more agile sequestering of services.  Paraphrasing a conversation with CTO Aneesh Chopra he said :

“A friend can get something done in an hour for free, but an official government procurement gets the same thing done in a year and costs a million dollars. How do we get developers like the ones in the Web 2.0 Expo ‘in the loop’ without having them move to DC and get on the GSA Schedule? – (via Mark Drapeau)

In response to this, Noveck explained how it’s Jeffrey D. Zients’s role as Chief Performance Officer to focus on Procurement reform. Apps.gov could, however, form part of a dramatic change in how the Federal Government buys commercial technology. By creating a process as effective and efficient as those offered by sites such as Amazon.com and eBay, there is a huge opportunity to reduce costs and streamline the procurement process.

Crowdsourcing initiatives such as BetterBuyProject are seeking ideas on ‘new collaboration and social media to make the federal acquisition process more efficient and effective’. The platform for this initiative is Uservoice, which is already listed as one of the Idea Generation tools available on Apps.gov.

‘Open Government meets Farmville’

At the end of the conversation Noveck referenced an interesting crowdsourcing experiment in the City of Manor, Texas (pop. 5,800). Tim O’ Reilly noted how the initiative was like ‘Open Government meets Farmville‘, in respect of the size of the city. The experiment highlights how innovation is possible even in small cities with very small budgets. On her blog Noveck writes:

The City of Manor, Texas (pop. 5800) has launched “Manor Labs,” an innovation marketplace for improving city services. A participant can sign up to suggest “ideas and solutions” for the police department, the municipal court, and everything in between. Each participant’s suggestion is ranked and rewarded with “innobucks.” These points can be redeemed for prizes: a million points wins “mayor for the day” while 400,000 points can be traded for a ride-along with the Chief of Police.

Manor is also one of the few cities currently using bar codes (known as QR or Quick Response Codes) to label physical locations around town. These bar codes can be scanned with a mobile phone to communicate historical and touristic information, data about the cost of a municipal service, or emergency management information. Manor is experimenting with techniques for providing different information to different audiences. If a resident scans a QR code outside a home for sale, she gets the floor plan and purchase price; whereas the building inspector gets the inspection history; and the first responder gets information about the current occupant.

While some of the Federal crowdsourcing initiatives highlighted above are restricted to Government employees only, the City of Manor allows anyone to participate regardless of where they live. The site currently has dozens of ideas at various stages of development.

Summary

Beth Noveck has a good story to tell. She highlighted many successful Government crowdsourcing initiatives and enthused about the potential for citizen developers to build apps based on raw Government data. There has been issues, however, around Open Government initiatives such as Recovery.gov (for poor data quality) and Data.gov (for not meeting expectations). Also, pilots such as Peer-to-Patent have not had their funding renewed, notwithstanding the success of the initiative.

Improving data quality, releasing the truly valuable and interesting Government datasets and finding a sustainable means to fund these initiatives should be an important consideration for the further expansion of Open Government initiatives.

The eagerly awaited directive is due to be released later this month. It should outline the steps Federal agencies need to take to embed transparency, collaboration, and participatory government into their processes. The success of this directive will not be judged by Beth Noveck, but rather by citizens in our progress towards a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

On November 19th, EU governments will meet in Malmo to sign a Ministerial Declaration on the key priorities for European e-government strategy over the next few years.

In recognition of this, a group of concerned citizens setup a campaign to collaboratively craft and get endorsed a declaration highlighting core principles for the advancement of European public services.

This Open declaration has now been created and will be presented at the official programme of the Ministerial Conference. The team is now seeking 2,000 endorsements for the declaration ‘in order to convince governments to fully embrace these values’.

A dedicated website has been created to allow citizens to register their support. The declaration has already received hundreds of endorsements (over 300 at last count) and has been translated into many languages including Greek, Catalan and Spanish.

Background

The video below explains the origin of the declaration and how the final text was arrived at.

The process towards the final declaration consisted of three phases:

1. Brainstorming - Uservoice was used to provide a platform through which citizens could submit policy recommendations for Public services 2.0. More than 40 recommendations were received and over 800 votes were cast.
2. Drafting the manifesto – The manifesto itself was drafted through the MixedInk platform. This enabled others to comment on and edit the document. Dozens of comments were collected which helped craft the final version of the declaration
3. Endorsement - This phase of the campaign is still in operation. A  detailed supporting programme on how to implement the key action points has been created, and the team is now seeking endorsement for the manifesto’s core principles and the actions needed for implementation.

The phased approach outlined above is similar to that taken by the Whitehouse during the drafting of the Open Government directive (to be released later this month). It’s also a similar approach to that being taken by the Australian government in relation to their Gov 2.0 taskforce. The medium through which the manifesto was created embodies the principles it seeks to embed within European public services i.e. that of openness, transparency and participation.

Manifesto Objectives

One of the primary objectives of the manifesto is for e-government policies to embrace ‘the open, meritocratic, transparent and user-driven culture of the web’. Encouraging innovation within European public services and allowing citizens to play a larger role in their provision is also a key objective. This can include the public building new public services based on open data, or simply engaging in dialog with Government around how service provision can be more citizen centric.

The manifesto focuses on three core principles for European public services:

1. Transparency – all public sector organisations should be “transparent by default”
2. Participation – government should pro-actively seek citizen input in all its activities
3. Empowerment – public institutions should seek to act as platforms for public value creation

The team note how these three principles converge in issues such as the importance of making data legally open. By doing this governments can empower citizens to proactively contribute towards improving public services or engaging in civic debate:

public institutions should seek to act as platforms for public value creation. In particular, government data and government services should be made available in ways that others can easily build on. Public organisations should enable all citizens to solve their problems for themselves by providing tools, skills and resources. They should also treat citizens as owners of their own personal data and enable them to monitor and control how these data are shared.

European governments are already under an obligation to open up their data under the European Council Directive on the re-use of public sector information. The declaration, however, is pushing for ‘real openness, not just accessibility on a website‘. This means conforming to Open government principles and a recognizing that, as Vivek Kundra says:

government does not have a monopoly on the best ideas.

Work is already underway in many of these areas. For example, the Semantic Interoperability Center Europe seeks to support the sharing of assets of interoperability to be used in public administration and eGovernment. Also, many of the finalists in the European eGovernment awards exemplify how the web can be used to empower citizens and businesses to more effectively interact with government.

The manifesto seeks to provide principles in which to frame answers to the pertinent questions regarding public service. The design, delivery and accountability of public services has been questioned, and new thinking is required in order to redefine the function of public services in the 21st century.

In order to facilitate new thinking, however, those working within government must be empowered to experiment and take risks in the delivery of public services. Andrea DiMaio highlights how the declaration fails to take into account how these tenets should be embraced internally by government employees. Gwynne Kostin also identifies this as an issue and quotes Mark Drapeau on Gov 2.0′s mid-life crisis:

Despite some leadership from influential individuals on using social software in government, there is still in many cases a disconnect between authorities issuing directives and ground troops carrying them out…

There are some key issues that need to be overcome in order for the principles of Open Government to be embraced. Nevertheless, the manifesto tenets are not necessarily directed toward only government-to-citizen interaction. Rather they are principles required for an open civic system, which includes Government to Government communication. Given this, I believe endorsing the manifesto can also be considered as a recognition that Gov 2.0 tenets need to be promoted as a necessary prelude towards effective reform of public services.

I’ve endorsed the manifesto and encourage you to do the same.

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Note: Malmo09 are organizing a conference to coincide with the 5th official EU e-government event in Malmo. Their aim is to offer a ‘creative statement of what Europeans really want from e-enabled government’. This Pecha Kucha style un-conference will issue their own popular declaration on e-government for Europe. For more information, or to attend see http://www.malmo09.org.

(Photo courtesy European Parliament on Flickr)

Voting is now open for who you think should win Google’s Project 10^100 Prize. Google launched the program a year ago and is committed to awarding $10 million in prizes. More than 150,000 ideas have been submitted in 25 languages. These have been grouped into 16 overall themes, and now they’ve turned to crowdsourcing, as a mechanism to find the most worthy themes. The project’s advisory board will then settle on five projects, and Google will ask companies or organizations to submit a request for proposal in these areas. Those who impress the board will then receive the money. Some of the 16 themes include:

• Promote health monitoring and data analysis

• Help social entrepreneurs drive change

• Provide quality education to African students

• Collect and organize the world’s urban data

• Make educational content available online for free

• Make government more transparent

The theme I’m most interested in, however, is making government more transparent. It’s what I’ve voted for and you can too before 8th October.

Make government more transparent

The theme around government transparency is something with many countries have been experimenting with over the past year. Civic organisations and governments in countries such as the US, UK, Germany, Australia, Netherlands and Sweden have been, or are in the process of, creating open-data catalogues for public consumption. Public information belongs to the Public. It’s it’s make available in easily accessible formats, people will find ways of using it productively e.g. through creating government apps (as San Francisco done).

Google have identified some of the suggestions that inspired this theme. They include:

• Create a “govwatch” program that allows people to enter in geographic and other info and get back information about bills/laws that affect them

Examples of applications exemplifying these theme are already available. ThisWeKnow allows citizens to easily find government data about their community. It was created as part of Sunlight’s Apps for America 2 competition. Another application resulting from this competition is Govpulse. It is based on the official journal of the federal government of the United States. Through this citizens can find any kind of proposal, notification, or solicitation for data that a federal agency puts out. Both these sites can be accessed via a ZIP code, so as to provide local information relevant to communities. Along with these apps, Recovery.gov’s new mapping tools, and the increasing number of transparency websites are allowing citizens to see different kinds of spending data relevant to their communities.

Some sites are already available that enable citizens to easily interact with their representatives through various communications platforms. Sites such as 2Gov.org, TweetCongress/Europatweets/Tweetminister, and HearFromYourMP are all examples of civic initiatives providing citizens with easily accessible platforms in which to contact their elected representatives and monitor their activities. While participation on Twitter does not necessarily translate into citizen engagement – as exemplified through research on Congressional use of Twitter – at least mechanisms such as trending topics and word clouds give an indication of their activity and views on particular issues.

Information Needs

The  goal of making government more transparent also forms one of the recommendations from the recent Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. It’s recommendation is to:

Require government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records, and make civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the productive public use of such data.

As part of this recommendation it believes legislation should be used to ensure openness applies to all public bodies and government contracts. Along with this meetings, legislative bodies and court proceedings should be transparent:

The public’s business should be done in public. Open-meetings laws should require that all public agencies conduct their deliberations and take their actions openly.  The public should be able to witness and participate in the process of governing.  If possible, governments should allow citizens to participate in hearings or other fact-gathering processes electronically.

At every level, legislative bodies should operate with genuine transparency.  Members of the public should be able to track and comment upon successive versions of proposed statutes and ordinances, whether federal, state, or local. Except in genuine emergencies, legislators should not vote on proposals that have not had public vetting with a meaningful opportunity for public comment.

Public trust in the judicial system likewise requires open courtrooms.  In criminal and civil matters, any closing of proceedings or sealing of records should meet a high standard in terms of the public interests protected. Court proceedings, particularly at the appellate level, should be open to cameras.

Similar recommendations were made in last year’s Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-T0-Know Agenda, which provides many significant ideas for improving transparency in government.

US transparency directive as a template

In the US, the Office of Management and Budget is due to issue a long-awaited government directive on Transparency and Openness across government. This directive will be the result of a three-part consultation with the public initiated by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Ideas and feedback were solicited from the public through online voting and wikis, before the recommendations were drafted.

The development of an Open Government policy should provide more guidance to federal, state and local government, in how they should make data available. This, along with the  National Association of State Chief Information Officers guidance, will provide effective advice for states and others on how to create transparency portals.

The Open Government directive and other guidance from the US can provide a template for other countries, in how the develope their transparency initiatives. Already, countries should as Australia appear to have learned from the US in how they are proceeding with their Government 2.0 initiatives. Their recent MashupAustralia competition, Gov 2.0 brainstorming site and Gov 2.0 issues consultation paper, are all initiatives that have been tried in other countries first:

MashupAustralia (AU) – Apps for Democracy (US)
Government 2.0 Suggestion box (AU) -  Open Government Brainstorm (US)
Commentable Gov 2.0 Issues paper (AU) – Digital Britain report (UK)

fully transparent in our work, participatory in soliciting your ideas and expertise, and collaborative in how we experiment together to use new tools and techniques for developing open government policy.

A relaunched Recovery.gov, went live earlier today with a host of new features designed to improve transparency of data and prevent and stop potential waste and fraud. The really important stuff, the recipient data, however, will not be available until Oct 15. Nevertheless there is some great new features including:

• New Mapping Tool – The maps are done very well with the ability to enter a zip code and get details of nearby contracts, grants and loans

• Download Center – This area allows users can download agency reporting data (and eventually recipient data). Data relating to contracts, grants and loans can be downloaded in XML and Excel formats.

Overall, the site looks a lot better and more interactive than its previous incarnation. It pulls together spending data from federal agencies, recipients of stimulus money and from FPDS.gov and USASpending.gov. The real transparency starts, however, when it begins posting data reported to FederalReporting.gov. Stimulus recipients must start submitting reports here next month.

While there has been some disappointment with different site features and its move away from the Drupal platform, it’s nonetheless a highly interactive and polished site.

For more on the site relaunch listen to the interview with Earl Devaney – Chairman of the Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board on Federal News Radio.