Citizen participation

I am not a tech-toy pioneer. It was two years before I logged onto my company’s instant message system because I thought it would create ADD symptoms (it didn’t). I just got a Blackberry a few weeks ago (yes, Blackberry, not iPhone) because I lost my PalmPilot calendar and they don’t make them anymore. And I resisted a Twitter account because I thought it was silly, frivolous, and seemingly narcissistic.

David Osborne, of Reinventing Government fame, keynoted today's session at the Saudi conference on public administration. He said there are two sets of reforms running in parallel across the globe today. The first focuses on getting the basics right: a professional public service, rule of law, prosecuting corruption, a transparent budget and contracting system, etc.

This past summer the spectacle of unruly congressional town hall meetings on health care reform played across the media.

While there’s been little open discussion in recent days about the progress of President Obama’s Open Government Directive, the General Services Administration’s quarterly “Intergovernmental Solutions” newsletter has dedicated its latest issue to describing dozens of examples of how citizen engagement is increasing in government – federal, state, local, as well as other countries. It is worth reading!

There’s a great lead article by Elise Castelli in this week’s Federal Times, “Feds to Empower ‘Citizen IGs’ to Watch Stimulus Spending.” This is a real experiment in the ultimate use of crowdsourcing – providing the data on spending via recovery.gov and letting on-the-ground citizens to help interpret and make sense of it in their communities.

For years, democracy advocates have promoted the notion of engaging citizens in their government. There are different ways of doing this (public hearings, debates, dialogue panels, etc), and at different points in the policy cycle (proposing, debating, implementing, reviewing, etc.).

Increasing participation in government by citizens is a key element of President Obama’s Transparency and Open Government initiative. He signed a directive his first full day in office to create guidance for agencies on how they should go about implementing the principles in the directive, but delays in appointing officials have led to a delay in the development and release of the guidance.

The Obama Administration’s data.gov website now has 110,000 government data sets that you can access and download. So what do you do with this stuff? Well, Sunlight Labs, an open government advocacy group, is sponsoring a contest encouraging citizens (well, okay, data geeks) to come up with applications that use the data in interesting ways.

A new study out by Brookings “Blogs as Public Forums for Agency Policymaking” looks at blogs created by top officials in five federal agencies and compared them to similar, but non-official blogs on the same topics to see how each are used to link citizens and government officials.