Cross Collaborate

You are browsing the archives ofOpen Government Initiative.

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 [...]

Will federal agencies really become more fully transparent, participatory and collaborative, as the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive promises? Hopes are high among advocates of the new policies that such practices will become the standard across the government. Turning that hope into the reality of a federal world of collaborative organizations, however, poses a vast [...]

Although I haven’t seen a lot of discussion about this so far, the emergence of interactive tools for online citizen engagement poses interesting questions for the future of public policy consensus building. It’s still early days in the development of the web technology, and experiments so far have been spotty. Despite the high orbit of [...]

Video courtesy of Web 2.0 ExpoSF-’09 and O’Reilly Media. Peter Koht of the City of Santa Cruz, CA, describes the city’s online method for gathering public ideas about how to handle a severe budget crisis. The platform is uservoice. Similar to the IdeaScale system used in the White House Open Government Initiative, it allows users [...]