Open Government Initiative: Phase II

Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Open Government Initiative: Phase II
Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, brings us an update on the Open Government Initiative:

Last week, the White House launched an unprecedented online process for public engagement in policymaking. That process began with a week of Brainstorming, hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration.

You have shared almost 900 submissions and 33,000 votes on ideas ranging from strategies for making government data more accessible to legal and policy impediments to transparency. Thank you!

The Brainstorming phase is drawing to an official close tonight at midnight. We are reviewing all material on the site in preparation for the Discussion Phase, which begins on Wednesday June 3rd. We’ll be distilling both the ideas from the Brainstorming and the comments from an online dialogue with government employees that took place earlier this spring on the MAX federal wiki. All comments from MAX will be publicly posted tomorrow on the Open Government website.

Our goal is to use the ideas from this first phase of the process as well as other input to inform deeper discussion on the Open Government blog in the Discussion phase. While the voting on the brainstorming submissions will be instructive, it will not determine which topics are discussed in the second phase. Rather, the Discussion is designed to dig in on harder topics that require greater exploration or refinement.

While we are doing our analysis of the first phase of brainstorming and moving on to the Discussion Phase next week, the Brainstorming has been lively and productive. So we will keep the Brainstorming site turned on for addition submissions through June 19th. While new postings may not feed into the Discussion or Drafting Phases, we’ll be on the lookout for interesting new posts.
At the end of the public engagement process, all posted submissions will go up on the Open Government website. (For you records management fans, the Open Government website is run by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and subject to the Federal Records Act.)

The tight schedule of this process is designed to ensure that your ideas inform the development of open government recommendations and the writing of subsequent policy and the development of open government projects as soon as possible. So while we are keeping the Brainstorming open, we will also move on to the next phase of the process beginning on June 3rd.

Longer reports and papers can always be submitted through opengov@ostp.gov.

The process of crafting open government policy will not end this week, this month, or this year. This is an ongoing effort, and your participation has been and will continue to be essential to its success.