Tag Archive for 'opengov'

Open Gov West: March 26-27 in Seattle, WA

Published by Tim on March 9, 2010 in Events. 1 Comment Tags: iap2, ncdd, ogw, opengov, seattle.

Looks like I finally get to attend one of the many events on Gov 2.0 and Open Government:

Open Gov West

The greater Northwest and Cascadia region is buzzing with innovative technology and civic engagement organizations, and a number of governments throughout the area have already launched open government directives. Hosted by the City of Seattle and Knowledge as Power, Open Gov West is bringing these leaders together to facilitate regional collaboration and share best practices across open government initiatives. Join us March 26 & 27 at Seattle City Hall!

The two-day event follows a hybrid format: day 1 will be a traditional conference, day 2 an unconference “with a spine of pre-determined topics”.

It’ll be my first time in Seattle, and there are plans under way for an NCDD dinner (watch their listserv for updates) as well as a get-together of local IAP2 members.

If you’re involved with NCDD or IAP2, please consider attending the conference. The thing about most of these Gov 2.0/OpenGov/Transparency etc. conferences and unconferences lately is that the public participation community is usually not very well represented. So this is a great (and inexpensive) opportunity to increase mindshare for this field. It would be great to see a few participation veterans turn out so we can maybe do a session together.

In other exciting news, I’ll be accompanied by our newly hired student intern from Germany. We’ll properly introduce him once he arrives in the Bay Area later this week.

Should be a fun trip!

New EPA Rulemaking Gateway: Building a Public Participation Calendar

Published by Tim on February 19, 2010 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments Tags: epa, ogd, opengov.

For some time, I’ve been suggesting the creation of a national public participation calendar and project directory as a key component of the Open Government Directive:

May 2009: Open Government Dialogue: “Create an Open Government Project Directory and Knowledge Base”
January 2010: Open Government Needs Public Participation Calendars

Based on this post on NextGov, it looks like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is moving in that direction: EPA Web site paving the way to transparency

As more agencies deploy online score cards that publicly chart the progress of specific missions, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Web site for tracking rulemaking could be a model, some government transparency activists say.

EPA launched its site, the Rulemaking Gateway, on Thursday to inform the public of the status of high-priority regulatory actions, such as proposals to control greenhouse gas emissions in heavy-duty vehicles and revise vehicle fuel economy labels.

[...]

EPA has committed to releasing rulemaking plans earlier than in the past. As soon as an agency regulatory policy officer determines it is appropriate to start developing a rule, information will be posted on the gateway, officials said. A regulation could appear on the site months or even years before a file is created on the governmentwide rule-tracking site Regulations.gov.

[...]

The gateway is tightly tied to Regulations.gov to increase public participation in the rulemaking process, said Madia, a federal regulatory policy analyst at the group.

[...]

The EPA Web site will show updated proposals monthly, as decisions are made. Time-sensitive information, such as announcements about public meetings, will be refreshed daily.

You can check out EPA’s new Rulemaking Gateway here.

Things are starting to look really interesting…

OpenGov Tracker

Published by Tim on February 15, 2010 in Metrics and Radar. 3 Comments Tags: ideascale, Metrics, ogd, opengov, visualization.

A few days ago, a new site was launched that helps track activity across the 23 federal agencies that are using IdeaScale for their consultations on Open Government: OpenGov Tracker

This webpage makes use of the IdeaScale API to aggregate data for all agencies which are making use of that platform. USDA and Health and Human Services also have public feedback sites; however they are not using IdeaScale and so unfortunately, are not included here. We encourage you to visit their sites, too!

Totals reflect all ideas including those submitted to the “Site Feedback” category. The “Top Ideas Across Government” section only highlights ideas in the categories of Transparency, Participation, Collaboration, and Innovation– eg., those related to the Open Government Plans themselves.

The site was created by Robbie Schingler and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, who both work at NASA.

This is a most excellent example of how participation tools can expose some of the quantitative information about an ongoing consultation (IdeaScale itself does some of the basics, though does not offer a convenient view across all 23 projects).

It’s especially nice to see how metrics are being made actionable. The section “Needs Some Love” lists those agencies that haven’t received a lot of input yet along with the call to action: “They need some love. Please help!”

This metrics dashboard is a nice addition to my tracking thread on GovLoop where we also try to keep an eye on qualitative data.

There is of course a lot more that the perfect dashboard could include but this is definitely a refreshing step forward.

Please leave a comment below if you know of any tools that offer this kind of eye candy out of the box.

Share Your OpenGov Forum Tracking Data on GovLoop

Published by Tim on February 9, 2010 in E-participation and Research. 3 Comments Tags: govloop, Metrics, ogd, opengov.

Following up on my list of ten things to monitor, I’ve started a thread on GovLoop: Monitoring and continuous evaluation of OpenGov forums

Here’s my initial post:

As part of my ongoing efforts to monitor the various feedback channels that have been launched as part of the Open Government Directive, I’ll be tracking some basic metrics. I thought I’d share the raw data here on a regular basis so people can chime in and add any other insights they’ve come across.

23 agencies are using IdeaScale, which exposes the following in real-time:

Number of ideas

Number of comments

Number of votes

Number of registered users

So that’s nice. I’ll check in on the other two forums occasionally as well (here, here).

Aside from cold, hard numbers, I will be looking for examples that illustrate how various agencies are doing in terms of the other nine items on my list. Here it is again in short form:

Expectation management

Community ground rules

Level of convener involvement/participation

Quality of moderation

Quantity of participation over time

Outreach and diversity of participants

Conclusion and impact

Tech support

Project communications

Mood

I’m using this RSS feed for easy scanning but don’t expect to catch everything. Please share your impressions in the comments.

A set of screenshots will be available on Flickr.

I hope this will attract enough metrics junkies so that we’ll end up with a fairly complete picture in the end. It would certainly be great to see not only a breadth of data points but also to have a discussion about what should be measured and how. After all, the participation piece of the upcoming dashboard still hasn’t been designed in detail yet. Maybe this little exercise will create a few valuable insights.

Ten Things to Monitor As Agencies Invite Input On Open Government Plans

Published by Tim on February 7, 2010 in E-participation, Public Participation and Research. 16 Comments Tags: ogd, opengov.

Now that a whole lot of agency.gov/open websites are live and many agencies have indeed set up a ”mechanism for the public to [...] [p]rovide input on the agency’s Open Government Plan” it’s time to figure out what to watch out for over the coming weeks and months in order to evaluate the success of these initiatives.

As I noted back in January, my hope is that these new projects will address and improve upon three key issues that we saw during last year’s Open Government Dialogue (namely, lack of convener involvement, insufficient moderation, herding).

All in all, I’ll keep an eye on the following (in no particular order):

Expectation management: Is the agency clear about the scope of their participation initiative and their promise to the public? Do participants know what impact they can reasonably expect and when?
Community ground rules: Every agency should have these “rules of engagement” in place and be ready to enforce them if needed. Bonus points for friendly, easy-to-understand language!
Level of convener involvement/participation: Does the agency become actively engaged in the discussions?
Quality of moderation: Will the agency manage to keep discussions on topic and moderate distractions in a fair but timely manner?
Quantity of participation over time: How many participants will sign up? How much content will they produce? (luckily, IdeaScale exposes a few basic metrics in real time, such as number of ideas, comments, votes and registered users)
Outreach and diversity of participants: Does the agency manage to attract a broad range of participants from various backgrounds? Or do usual suspects dominate the discussions?
Conclusion and impact: This one will be especially interesting as there doesn’t seem to be an end date defined for any of these initiatives. In case of ongoing participation programs, does the agency at least share interim results? Looks like this effort is scheduled to go through March 19, 2010.
Tech support: Does the agency address technical support questions and resolve any issues in a timely manner?
Project communications: Does the agency offer ways for participants to stay in the loop (or get up to speed quickly) with regard to current state of the discussion, frequently asked questions, highlights, interim results, next steps etc.?
Mood: Overall, how happy is everyone with the process? What’s the energy level? Are things productive? Etc.

What else should be on the radar? Sound off in the comments.

OpenGov Open Feedback Firehose

Published by Tim on February 6, 2010 in Uncategorized. 12 Comments Tags: ogd, opengov.

Update 2010/02/15: Added feeds for Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the list below, added National Archives to Pipes feed.

The Open Government Directive, issued on December 8, 2009 stated:

1. Publish Government Information Online

[...]

e. Within 60 days, each agency shall create an Open Government Webpage located at http://www.[agency].gov/open to serve as the gateway for agency activities related to the Open Government Directive and shall maintain and update that webpage in a timely fashion.

f. Each Open Government Webpage shall incorporate a mechanism for the public to:

i. Give feedback on and assessment of the quality of published information;
ii. Provide input about which information to prioritize for publication; and
iii. Provide input on the agency’s Open Government Plan (see 3.a.).

That day is today!

Here are three sites that track which of the agency.gov/open pages are already live or have feedback options in place:

As was expected, most of these sites are using IdeaScale for input gathering and discussion. Some of you may remember this tool from phase 1 of the Open Government Dialogue (see here, here).

Below is a list of RSS feeds available from the various idea gathering and discussion forums (scroll down for link to the ultimate combo firehose feed):

1. Federal Communications Commission

http://rebootfcc.uservoice.com/forums/40005-open-how-can-the-fcc-improve-its-work-on-the-open/activity.atom
http://rebootfcc.uservoice.com/forums/37117-engagement-what-are-ways-in-which-the-fcc-can-bet/activity.atom
http://rebootfcc.uservoice.com/forums/37639-engagement-how-can-the-fcc-also-increase-engageme/activity.atom
http://rebootfcc.uservoice.com/forums/37637-engagement-what-technologies-and-practices-could-/activity.atom
http://rebootfcc.uservoice.com/forums/37643-engagement-how-can-the-fcc-better-facilitate-the-/activity.atom
http://rebootfcc.uservoice.com/forums/37175-engagement-how-should-the-fcc-improve-its-engagem/activity.atom
http://rebootfcc.uservoice.com/forums/37118-engagement-in-what-ways-can-social-networks-furth/activity.atom

2. Social Security Administration