Great OpenGov exchange at USDA. Here are some takeaways, links and Q's re: Next Steps

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Permalink Reply by Joe Sanchez on May 6, 2010 at 2:12pm

Q1. With agency OG Plans drafted, do you sense progress and/or momentum?

Progress and momentum, yes. Acceleration, very little.

Progress is being made on OG per the December 2009 OG schedule. Plans have been developed, published, and those plans are being executed. Given that momentum is defined as mass times velocity, there is some momentum, the key word being "some."

However, another factor is acceleration. Acceleration is defined as the rate of change of velocity. Are we seeing change, based on OG, accelerate within government? Acceleration precedes momentum so acceleration is a driver of momentum.

Communications, especially external-facing communications such as press releases, are a strong indicator of strategic changes in the public and private sectors. When external communications, especially from executives, stop referring to initiative "plans" and start referring to actions and outcomes resulting from / based on those initiatives, change is accelerating. When this starts happening, initiatives and the resulting changes are becoming institutionalized in the organizations processes and perhaps most importantly, in its cultural DNA. They become integral as a "way of doing business." From this perspective, OG appears to currently not have alot of acceleration.

A Google search of "open government" and one of OG's tenets, "transparency," and various Federal agency names yields search results where just about all agency-originated communications and/or press releases still refer to their OG plans or the Ideascale sites that were launched in early 2010 to solicit OG ideas. This was not an all-encompassing search so if there are communications that I missed that refer to actions and outcomes resulting from / based on those OG initiatives, please point those out.

Granted, OG plans are fairly new but there are and will be events, for better or worse, which provide opportunities for government to explicitly emphasize how it is integrating OG in its response. One notable and commendable action, in response to such an event, has been the White House's establishment of a web page to communicate The Ongoing Administration-Wide Response to the Deepwater BP Oil Spill @ http://ht.ly/1HPeL.

Open Government will be an evolutionary change in the way government operates and how it engages with citizens, businesses, and other NGOs. Federal agency leaders should look at how they and their agencies are leveraging communications to show mission-based actions and outcomes based on / resulting from OG. While OG plans are important, OG should not be viewed as plan-based; it should be viewed as way of doing business. This POV will help accelerate OG and increase its momentum.