Open Government: Transparent Complexity

The federal government is really running with President Obama’s transparency mandate.

Setting aside a few controversial decisions to hold certain material back for specific reasons [torture photos, for instance], agencies are hard at the task of opening up the government to let citizens see what’s inside.

Witness the White House/National Academy of Public Administration’s Open Government Dialogue. It’s a public-private effort to figure out how to get the government to use social media technologies to increase citizen interaction.

Read the Office of Science and Technology’s blog summary of a recent effort to consolidate recent transparency-related brainstorming in order to nudge it toward action.

A complicated effort? A massive coordination challenge? You bet. Just take a look at the White House’s visual summary of the terrain that has been covered so far. This is, of course, just an excerpt.

This visual presentation of the process/output is itself much more transparency-enhancing than the companion texts, meeting notes, etc. But it illustrates this: The effort is huge and nobody should believe this is going to be easy.

An even simpler–which is to say, even more transparent–summary of recent federal transparency activities can be found at the White House’s Open Government Initiative webpage.

Check out the Innovations Gallery and the transparency timeline at the bottom of the home page.