Moving from Cacophony to Culling in the President's Open Government Initiative
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, May 29 2009
Round One of the White House's Open Government Initiative creation process wrapped at midnight last night. Deputy U.S. CTO for Open Government Beth Noveck blogs on WhiteHouse.gov that the brainstorming portion pulled in about 900 ideas and 33,000 votes. So, is that good? Well, as in many ways this was a first-of-its kind experiment, there aren't too many apples-to-apples comparisons to be made. That said, the Recovery.gov "national dialogue" on IT pulled in just over half the idea submissions, with 470. And let's face it, open government is somewhat more obscure than IT, and offers less bait for vender participation as well. With that in mind, Round One of the Open Government Initiative enjoyed a not insignificant level of participation.
We know, we know, this wasn't a contest. But still, with 674 votes, the winner is...drumroll...House Republican John Boehner's somewhat off-topic call for a 72-hour pre-vote vetting period on congressional bills. Other highly-rated and solid ideas: funding long-term public collaboration projects on a multi-year basis, rather than going back to the trough year after year; and putting the President’s Management Council in charge of holding agencies to the president's open government principles. Finally, in what might be considered both a victory and a defeat, the inevitable marijuana question came in 5th with 279 votes.
The next step, writes Noveck, will be integrating Round One's public submissions with what was culled from the internal MAX discussion amongst federal employees from several weeks back. Then next Wednesday, June 3rd, begins Round Two, the discussion round. Noveck has details. (Noveck also announced a nice feature that increases the transparency of the OGI. Once this process is wrapped, all submissions will be archived on the White House's Open Government website for all the world to see.)