Gauging open government: What do you want to see on the White House's newest dashboard?
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, December 17 2009
If there's one thing that is coming to be a hallmark of the Obama approach to managing government, it may well be this: dashboards. A favorite of the modern business world, computer-based dashboards aim to give executives a glimpse at whether his or her organization's constituent parts are working together to form a smooth-running machine. As quickly as your speedometer or gas gauge tells you what you need to know about your car, a management dashboard is meant to inform the boss about organizational performance.
But when it comes to the U.S. Open Government Dashboard currently in the works at the White House, the "boss" is meant to be you -- an interested public and outside watchdog groups.
Fourteen different federal agencies and departments, from the will have their performances tracked when the open government dashboard goes live, scheduled under the terms of the terms of the President's recently-released Open Government Directive to happen no later than February 6th of 2010. And the White House is looking for helping figuring out just what the dashboard should track. "We need to enlist your help holding 'our feet to the fire,'" blogged Beth Noveck, Deputy U.S. CTO for Open Government. "We are looking for your input about what metrics the Dashboard should measure." The White House is taking comments through the Office of Science and Technology Policy's WordPress blog.
The U.S. Open Government Dashboard will join a growing stable of Obama Administration performance dashboards scattered about the Internet, like USASpending.gov (tag line: "Where Americans can see where their money goes"), the Federal IT Dashboard ("Your window into the federal IT portfolio"), Recovery.gov ("Track the money").
But this dashboard on openness will be something a bit different. Those dashboards are, for better or for worse, fed by hard financial data. The U.S. Open Government gauge will, to be effective, have to measure somewhat softer changes in performance. And for a White House counting on a major culture shift to take care of enforcement, measuring who's heeding the President's call to openness takes on increased importance.
The easiest things for the dashboard to track are those questions that can be answered with, more or less, a simple yes or no. Has the agency built the required website at agency.gov/open? (The Sunlight Foundation's Labs division is also going to keep tabs on the launching of those sites on their own SunlightLabs.com/open site.*) Have they met the Open Government Directive's call to build out Data.gov by adding three "high-value" datasets to its stores? Has the agency placed a "the buck stops here" sign on one employee's desk? What about Freedom of Information Act inquiries? The departments will be judged on whether their meeting the Open Government Directive's call to becomes more responsive to FOIA requests.
Other metrics are going to require someone in the Executive Office of the President to make a value judgment. Are the Secretary of the department and other senior officials engaging online in a way that actually increases public engagement, whether that's regular online townhalls or webcast public hearings? Do they use new digital tools to engage with the public, and to help their own employees stay in touch between meetings? Is the Defense Department or USDA simply vomiting up worthless data so that they can check a box? Or are they putting out edifying information that actually furthers their mission and responds to what the public is looking for? Is the Department of Energy or Department of Transportation getting meaningful input from outside scientists?
Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, housed in OSTP, and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra , part of OMB, are ultimately responsible for the creation of the open government dashboard. It will be accompanied by a forum so that agencies can share best practices.
*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.