Open Gov: What’s gone Right, What’s gone wrong

June 20, 2012

Open Gov: What’s gone Right, What’s gone wrong

I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the recent MIT-Kinght Foundation Civic Media Conference in Boston.

The panel was chaired by Susan Crawford and included Chris Vein, Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation, and Mike Norman from WeFunder.com.

The panel discussed what has worked well in the open government movement, and things that have not worked so well. Some good ideas for keeping the movement strong and thoughts on where it is going were offered.

A pretty good discussion I thought. I hope you do to.

gov20, Open Government

3 responses to “Open Gov: What’s gone Right, What’s gone wrong”

danielbevarly

June 20, 2012 at 5:24 pm

Mark – I thought it was good discussion and very insightful. Although, it was concerning to me. I appreciate and do understand the focus on \”data\” surrounding these discussions on open government –mainly because there are a lot of technology people who are invited to these discussions. However, I continue to find fault with both government and the technology community to focus almost exclusively on open government as a data challenge, without regard to the dialog challenge to reconnect citizens with their government –which should be the first priority with social media IMO.

Another concern is the focus to advance private sector, for-profit ventures with government around the open gov concept without surveying or participation from the end-user customer, i.e., citizens, who frankly seemed to be slighted throughout this discussion. Still a very insightful panel discussion that provided me additional insight and knowledge into this perplexing challenge we call open government. That\’s my $.02 worth. Dan
mheadd

June 20, 2012 at 5:53 pm

Good points – there was a brief mention of the “open government movement” being about citizen engagement (in addition to open data), but perhaps not enough.

I agree – enhancing opportunities for citizen engagement are a key part of this effort.

If you’re interested, have a look at the Engagement Commons – a project of Code for America focused in identifying solutions that can be used to better connect citizens with their governments.

engagementcommons.org
A mobile app to counteract the effect of SuperPACs? [LINKS] — Technically Philly

June 29, 2012 at 2:03 pm

[…] Open Gov: What’s Gone Right, What’s Gone Wrong [Civic Innovations, Mark Headd's blog] [VIDEO] […]

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About Me

I am the former Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia. I also served as Director of Government Relations at Code for America, and as Director of the State of Delaware’s Government Information Center. For about six years, I served in the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), and helped pioneer their work with state and local governments. I also led platform evangelism efforts for TTS’ cloud platform, which supports over 30 critical federal agency systems.

Civic Innovations