Earlier today, the FASTForward Blog hosted a webinar discussion with Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, titled: Gov 2.0: The Collaborative Opportunities of Open Government
A recording of the webinar is available on the FASTForward Blog. I was lucky enough to get one question in (starts at around 45:50):
With regard to public participation, what are the next milestones for the Open Government Initiative as we’re going into 2010?
Here’s what Beth Noveck had to answer (transcript mine):
Number one, the creation of an Open Government Directive that will ask every government agency to develop its own Open Government plan, a plan that will ask agencies to develop strategic priorities around the release of data, the development of citizen engagement pilots and projects and the greater use of collaboration and the kind of collaborative problem solving and really the use of innovative policy approaches that we mentioned a bit of on the phone.
So I think that that’s very important and everything that will follow from that in terms of the institutionalization, organization and best practice sharing, and idea exchange.
I think the second big milestone will be the move towards development of new platforms, in other words, making technologies more widely available across government as we learn what works and what doesn’t work so that people can take advantage of the new tools to do these things. So for example, there already is — completely ad hoc — a group who are sharing best practices and tools around employee brainstorming and innovation. So one agency was already doing it, asking employees for ideas and advice, several other agencies said “We’d like to do the same thing” and they spontaneously essentially come together to share code, to share ideas about how to do that. So institutionalizing those practices and platforms around a range of more open projects.
The last thing is really trying also to link up more effectively major presidential priority areas around specific open government projects. In other words, you’ve seen something like the VA’s project to reduce the backlog of veteran benefits applications. Similarly, other kinds of priority areas like that where there is really an imperative to get something done, whether it’s around STEM education (science and technology, engineering and math), or entrepreneurship, or climate change, in which I think the application of these principles of transparency, participation and collaboration and the tools that enable them can be brought to bear to enable us to address these problems more effectively and in new ways.
So I guess that means we can expect to see more e-participation pilots at various levels of government. Very exciting times indeed!
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Thanks to the trackback on the STEM-ology blog, I updated my transcript slightly. It now reflects the fact that “STEM” is an acronym for “science and technology, engineering and math”.
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