Government 2.0 Club

[Helen Mitchell CurtisParticipant]

There are certainly more and more Government Agencies jumping on the band wagon to follow President Obama’s directive for them to become more collaborative, open, transparent and participatory. But the real question is – what measures are being taken to evaluate the success or failure of all these efforts?

I’m writing an article for eContent Magazine to help identify what’s being done to evaluate & measure success. I would love to include your lessons learned, methods and techniques applied, new process improvements, success & even failures that led you to change the way you’re doing business to become more open, collaborative, transparent & participatory. You can email me directly or share your info here to help others.

Can you advise if your Government Agency (and others you know of) are analyzing, evaluating & measuring success and collecting feedback for Gov 2.0 initiatives? I’d appreciate any metrics, reports, links to information you may already have posted on any studies, surveys, feedback, usability studies, etc. It would be helpful if you’d share what tools, efforts, processes have been put in place to ensure internal and external stakeholders, customers, constituents, etc. are finding these new open, transparent & collaborative initiatives meet their needs to quickly access relevant information, improve their knowledge, feel that they are being heard & responded to, better served in their communities, empowered to make change, engage with your Agency, etc.

Much Appreciated,

Helen Mitchell, Principal

Enterprising Solutions

[email protected]

[Gary Berg-CrossParticipant]

You might find some relevant discussion in “Smarter, Better, Open Government group Discussions ”

https://www.govloop.com/group/smarterbetteropengovernment

[Stephen BuckleyParticipant]

Helen,

By the wording of your question, I see that you understand the ways in which OpenGov needs to be measured. Unfortunately (in a way), you are way ahead in that understanding as compared to the vast majority of those who wrote, and responsible for implementing, the OpenGov Plans of federal agencies.

The OpenGov Plans are supposed to explain how they are going to measure progress (see any Plan’s section on “flagship initiative”), but very few do that. And, of the few that do, the measures are sparse (e.g., the number of vistors to their agency’s website).

And even though youy may have already written the article by now, but here’s what we talked about a few months ago on OpenGovRadio. (You can get most of it from the links without having to listen to the whole program.)

But just HOW do we measure the progress of federal agencies in “Transparency”, “Participation”, and “Collaboration?” http://bit.ly/9nPGR3

“How to Measure Success in OpenGov” http://bit.ly/9JKbQn

I’d like to see the link to your article. And if you come upon any discussions on this topic, please let me know. I don’t see OpenGov being implemented very effectively until the people doing it have a better idea of how they know that they are making progress.

Measuring activity is not the same as measuring progress.

[Helen Mitchell CurtisParticipant]

Hi Stephen,
I did have to finalize and submit my article to eContent Magazine. It will be published in their July/Aug. Magazine and also become available online then. I can send you the final copy from the editing folks if you’d like. I researched this quite a bit and think we’re of the same mindset. There is a good course being offered by Alex Lanshur that I think ALL Govt agencies should be required to take on how to develop the right metrics & measurement strategies for their OGov initiatives. I also looked at a number of the Agencies OGov Plans and was sorely disappointed in how few identified any type of measurement or search strategy. HHS was one of the few I found. Also the flagship initiatives could use a lot of work as well to ensure citizens are able to find information relevant tot them. I also just covered the OGI Conf. in D.C. if you’d like to read my write-up on that – some similar issues still exist – http://bit.ly/a6Gr3x BTW – my emailk address is [email protected]

[Stephanie NobleParticipant]

Check out http://www.padennoble.com/politics/darrin-sharif-newark-political-social-media. Like private organizations, campaigns have a bottom line, that’s votes. The donations are great and allow for payment of methods to obtain votes. The metrics often lend perspective and insight, but in the end it’s about the bottom line. How many re-tweets, friends, fans, comments, shares, etc. does it take for someone to be a committed voter. In traditional GOTV efforts, we analyze touches. Same with an online campaign that complements the traditional door knocking.

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