Comments on: Meeting with White House officials this Friday

By: Jonathan Eyler-Werve

Jonathan Eyler-Werve — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:15:57 +0000

I share this concern.

By: Lucas Cioffi

Lucas Cioffi — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:54:29 +0000

Thanks for the ideas, everyone. I will hand out copies of the Public Engagement Principles NCDD designed two years ago, I’ll express the concern that full-scale public engagement must be well-planned and that September provides even less time than they used for public engagement during the original (smaller) Open Government Directive, and I will bring up the central point that public participation is as critical to opengov as transparency is. I’ll take notes and report back on the NCDD blog.

By: Stephen Buckley

Stephen Buckley — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 06:37:56 +0000

Although I am pleasantly surprised to discover another contingent of Open Government advocates, I am concerned that their “roadmap” is attempting is too ambitious in its timetable.

In the U.S., President Obama explained his OpenGov principles & policy in January 2009 in his Presidential Memorandum on Transparent and Open Government. Later that year (11 months), the White House issued the Open Government Directive with specific instructions for implementing the President policy.

But it is the opposite in the OpenGov Partnership’s “roadmap”. First a country must write an “Action Plan” (with public consultation by latter half of September!) and only THEN adopt a “Declaration of Principles” (that is not yet drafted).

http://www.opengovpartnership.org/downloads/OGP-Roadmap-2011-08-07.pdf

I’m afraid that someone “higher-up” is pushing the OMB bureaucrats to deliver the “Action Plan” by the time of the U.N. meeting in September. With such a short timeframe, there would be NO “public consultation” on the Action Plan as specified in the OGP’s “roadmap”.

That time would be better spent drafting a much shorter document (e.g., like Obama’s 1-pager): the OGP’s “Declaration of Principles”.

By: Susan Stuart Clark

Susan Stuart Clark — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 04:28:15 +0000

Thanks Sandy for putting this multi-national effort on our radar screen. We’ll look forward to seeing what they come up with.

By: Sandy Heierbacher

Sandy Heierbacher — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 01:08:34 +0000

Thank you for the reminder to use the PEP principles, Tim! And you have a nice post up on the Intellitics blog at http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2011/07/19/open-government-partnership/ about the OGP that people should check out as well.

By: Tim Bonnemann

Tim Bonnemann — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:04:43 +0000

The OGP roadmap lays out specific requirements with regard to public participation.

Back in the Spring of 2009, a group of organizations led by NCDD, IAP2 and the Co-Intelligence Institute developed the Core Principles for Public Engagement (see: http://ncdd.org/pep/). It’s hard to tell to what extent these recommendations were ever fully embraced by the administration, but they still apply today.

This latest Open Government initiative is a good opportunity to once again present the work we all did two years ago. Maybe this time around there will be more of an effort to get the public participation pieces right.

Look forward to hearing how the meeting went.