The Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative may well be an historic step forward in meeting the goals of transparency, participation and collaboration. But the way these goals are being translated into practice – and evaluated – at least in this early phase, makes me wonder if the initiative will lead to greater accountability and trust in government.
Trust is not so much a feeling as a measured confidence in the reliability of a relationship, a confidence developed over time by fair and open behavior as well as fulfilled commitments. At a public institutional level trust can’t depend on the goodwill and promises of today’s agency leadership but has to be reflected in day to day operations and interactions with all levels of staff over time. The delivery of concrete benefits is one crucial purpose of Open Government policies, but the long-term changes in culture and procedure are what set the groundwork for trust and productive collaboration.
As this NextGov post reports, internal government factors, such as cultural resistance of some federal employees, can impede early progress. An initiative toward greater openness across the vast federal bureaucracy can’t happen overnight. Yet results tend to be measured only by immediate changes. (For example, have a look at this Washington Post article as well as this one and the White House response.)
Many fear that government agencies could look at the initiative as an exercise in check-list compliance and so rely at times on quick scorecard evaluation. That’s understandable since the public is a long way from trusting the government to meet the promise of openness, and many in government don’t trust the public to get any closer to decision-making than they already are. Given that reality, check-list and scorecard seem the only reliable ways to measure progress. But both keep the focus on details of short-term action rather than deeper and more lasting change. Read more »
















