Data Management

Open Government Initiative Gets Mixed Reviews

Mitch Wagner, California Bureau Chief, Light Reading

July 17, 2009

3 Min Read

It's comforting to note that even the Obama White House faces the same problems in jump-starting Web 2.0 initiatives that the rest of us face: Not enough people participating, and, of the people who do participate, many are looking to hijack the forum to serve their own agenda.Federal Computer Week asked three experts to look at the White House's attempts at open government, and they gave the effort mixed grades, lauding the White House for getting involved in using Web 2.0 to solicit citizen discussion, but finding that the execution needed work.

The White House embarked on a three-phase, six-week effort:

Solicit ideas from the public (Phase I: Brainstorm)
Generate discussion about the best ideas (Phase II: Discuss)
Enable participants to collaborate on drafting specific policy recommendations (Phase III: Draft)
By the time the project wrapped up last week, OGI had received more than 6,000 contributions via a brainstorming application, blog and wiki. The net result was more than 300 recommendations on how to improve transparency, strengthen public participation, and enable collaboration among government agencies and between the public and private sectors.
However, the various forums also received a lot of public input that was clearly off point. The contributions included a slew of comments that question the legitimacy of Barack Obama's presidency. Those latter participants were outraged further when forum moderators removed some comments after other users flagged them as off topic or redundant.

Of the three experts FCW solicited for comments on the experiment, I thought Glenn Schlarman, former chief of the information policy and technology branch at the Office of Management and Budget, had the most interesting things to say. He compared the White House effort to a two-week, online meeting coordinated by the Office of Management and Budget in 1995. He said the White House effort lacked participation and leadership. Agencies need to drive openness, rather than the White House.

New policy memos, even from the president, seldom convert nonbelievers and thus work only until the next policy memo arrives. And agencies balk when told to do anything within existing resources. So, to prevent the seeds of greater openness from being choked out, you will need to provide new dollars, force redirection of existing dollars or clearly prove how openness is mission enhancing, not distracting.

By the way, the people "question[ing] the legitimacy of Barack Obama's presidency" that FCW references are people who say that Obama's election was illegitimate because he is not an American citizen. I'm highly skeptical of those claims.

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