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.

But there are alternatives. K. D. Payne, for example, uses much more comprehensive methods of measuring transparency and trust relating to open government, summarized in this post. She also discusses the research of Brad Rawlins and his paper, Measuring the Relationship Between Organizational Transparency and Trust.

The underlying change that can lead to greater trust as well as concrete results is just as much about values and process as immediate delivery of benefits. As stated in the Open Government Progress Report, a major purpose of the Open Government Directive is to “instill the values of transparency, participation, and collaboration into the culture of every agency.” The Directive is intended to “hardwire accountability” into the structure and processes of federal agencies.

But the approach to hardwiring leaves a lot to be desired if the goal really is to go beyond short-term accomplishments and achieve a new default behavior built on openness and accountability. I don’t underestimate the difficulty of creating any long-term change in Washington. The intense pressure of politics and 24-hour media coverage constantly push for the quick turnaround. Nevertheless, lasting changes of default behavior have been achieved. For example, environmental review and public participation, despite short-comings, became the norms of federal decision-making over decades of increasing institutionalization.

The Open Government Directive has a very imbalanced way of beginning this process. It puts transparency about data far ahead of the other values of participation and collaboration. The latter seem to await definition through each agency’s Open Government Plan, but all the attention up front and the early standards of measuring progress are about data. Not only is there an imbalance in implementation, there is also an overly limited working definition of each of these three values and the practices based on them.

The Administration describes its approach to the three in these quotes from the Open Government Progress Report:

Transparency promotes accountability by providing citizens with information about what their government is doing and by putting government data online.
…..
Greater access to information about how the government does its work, drives greater citizen participation. This Administration’s commitment to public participation is based on the simple notion that many of the best ideas come from outside of Washington.
…..
While participation brings information to government so that officials can make more informed policy decisions, collaboration focuses on finding innovative strategies for solving challenges.

It’s certainly important to achieve all three as stated in this way. But transparency involves a lot more than publishing data, participation more than getting ideas from the public and collaboration more than coming up with innovative strategies for solving problems.

Let’s take the principle of transparency since that is the primary focus of the initiative at this point. Data sets are a start but not enough to achieve accountability. To quote from Brad Rawlin’s research:

Therefore, transparency is defined as having these three important elements: information that is truthful, substantial, and useful; participation of stakeholders in identifying the information they need; and objective, balanced reporting of an organization’s activities and policies that holds the organization accountable.
…..

Transparency cannot meet the needs of the stakeholders unless public agencies know what they need. Therefore, stakeholder participation elevates disclosure to transparency. Stakeholders must be invited to participate in identifying the information they need to make accurate decisions.

Transparency also requires accountability. Transparent organizations are accountable for their actions, words, and decisions, because these are available for others to see and evaluate. It requires that persons in transparent organizations contemplate their decisions and behaviors, because they will most likely have to justify them before an open court of opinion.

The Administration has a long way to go in achieving transparency in this larger sense, but this is what’s necessary to build public trust in government. It may be far more than anyone can expect, given the constant barrage of crises the White House has to deal with. But the Open Government documents themselves have created high expectations, and, if they can be met, a collaborative approach to public decisions could become the new standard.

Related posts:

1. Ideas for Implementing the Open Government Directive

In February 2009, a group of 150 randomly-selected Australian citizens were brought together at Old Parliament House in Canberra. Called “The Citizens Parliament”, the group spent four days discussing politics, policy, and systems of parliament. While the specific subjects under consideration were not prescribed, the attendees were asked to address the broad question:

“How Can Australia’s Political System be Strengthened to Serve Us Better?” Here, speaking as part of the Department of the Senate Occasional Lecture series, political scientist John Dryzek reports back on the event.

John Dryzek is a pioneer in the field of deliberative democracy, and has written several books on the subject, including “Discursive Democracy” and “Deliberative Global Politics”. He is a professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.

Related posts:

1. Deliberating to Change Public Policy
2. Open Government Initiative – Phase 2: Enhancing Citizen Engagement

Video made available online by UsNowFilm

This is the second in a series of videos presenting ideas by innovative thinkers about collaboration, governance and the internet. In the first, Clay Shirky described the impact of online collaboration in almost visionary terms as changing the nature of organization and the control of information. Charles Leadbeater has a more measured view. While recognizing the enormous potential of online collaborative technology, he also sees the need for a form of management which can direct creativity to specific action.

To quote from his bio:

Charles Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and creativity. He has advised companies, cities and governments around the world on innovation strategy and drawn on that experience in writing his latest book We-think: the power of mass creativity, which charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning.

Charles’s current research focuses on how mass, user driven innovation is reshaping organisations, with users increasingly co-creators of products and services.

Related posts:

1. Weaving Collaborative Networks – 1
2. Networks and Collaboration

Networks have been a hot topic for several years and with good reason. Their widespread and varied uses have the potential to change the way business gets done, and those changes are having an impact on governance as well. In fact, the term “governance” is coming to mean the networking among public, private and nonprofit sectors to achieve public purposes. Collaborative governance – one of this blog’s key concerns – is virtually synonymous with networks of this type.

Unlike a number of innovative methods that have come into fashion in recent years, such as reinventing government, the formation of networks has come about spontaneously, not through the promotion of a new concept. In fact, theory, explanations and new terminology are only now catching up with a phenomenon already well entrenched in governance.

Networks are now responsible for such public functions as:

• the delivery of social services,

• construction of transportation facilities,

• development of emergency response systems,

• the functioning of the armed forces, and

• efforts to manage widespread, even global, environmental threats.

These networks have emerged to meet needs of enormous scale that transcend the capacity of individual agencies. But they also pose a challenge to the existing institutions of government. That is because they devolve power among autonomous actors in a relatively “flat” structure. They cannot be controlled through the normal procedures of agencies that function through hierarchies, with power and authority flowing from the top down. There is a tension between the horizontal and vertical dynamic of power.

I believe that tension shows up in collaborative public policy efforts, whether they seek consensus for future plans or use mediation to resolve active disputes. Each collaboration has the potential to function as an effective network. The problem is that often no one realizes this – neither conveners, participants or, in some cases, the facilitator/mediator assisting the process. It is a paradigm that so far has been used to describe the result of a consensus building process after the fact rather than one all participants have in mind at the beginning of the effort.

There could be advantages in using the consensus building and network paradigms together, especially in educating conveners and stakeholders who have not yet experienced the process.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the public agency leaders who convene a collaborative can easily assume they will control the process in somewhat the same manner as they control other projects – through a hierarchical structure of authority. They certainly recognize the importance of getting the major interest groups together. They often assume, though, that they can set the agendas, control the facilitator through a contractual relationship and generally retain a role of first among equals, rather than participating on the same footing as the other stakeholders. For their part, the participants may well assume that the familiar rules apply and that the convener holds all the cards. Until these assumptions change, and a more collaborative mindset comes to prevail, the process can drag on in an atmosphere of suspicion.

The consensus building paradigm is critical in overcoming such obstacles, but it tends to focus everyone primarily on reaching agreement. When that moment of consensus arrives, it is the emotional high point of the process. This is an accomplishment that the stakeholders themselves have completed after a lot of hard work, and that is often unprecedented in the history of dealing with the problem. But implementation often seems like a separate event, a critical step that gives meaning to the agreement but one that will occur in the future.

If the consensus paradigm is reframed as a key element in the larger network paradigm, then the group is more likely to focus on implementation – their own action on the ground – as the primary goal. From the start the emphasis is on the stakeholders coming together to form a collaborative network that enhances the power of all members to make practical, measurable changes. Within that structure each interest group is an autonomous actor. No one controls the network, and, by taking part, each member agrees to accept responsibility to contribute whatever resources they can to carrying out action to address the common problem.

Agreement is the precondition but only one step in facilitating the concerted effort of the network. The commitment of the stakeholders is to function as part of the collaborative network to achieve a solution beyond the reach of any single actor within that voluntary structure.

That strikes me as a more concrete and understandable idea for stakeholders than the concept that empowerment comes from guiding a consensus process. The network focuses on the doing as the goal and not only the decision about what should be done.

I’m interested in your response to this suggestion. It’s one I’ll elaborate in future posts, but I’d like to know if you think it’s helpful and, if so, why.

Related posts:

1. Online Networks & the Future of Politics
2. Weaving Collaborative Networks – 2
3. Weaving Collaborative Networks – 1