Reposted from "Increasing Citizen Engagement in Government," the Fall 2009 newsletter from the Center for Intergovernmental Solutions, an office of the General Services Administration.

To be effective, Internet professionals navigate between two dangerous currents: dismissal and utopianism. The challenges of dismissal are pretty obvious—the boss who forgets to invite you to the meeting, or the subtler demotion of online work to a pure marketing function.

The risks of utopianism are harder to see, but the danger is just as great: If we overstate how online tools can change the world, we ask our clients and colleagues to sail on faith into uncharted waters and we risk losing allies in the daily work that makes change a reality over time.

The Obama Administration arrived on a surge of optimism about online partnerships between citizens and government. As excitement transitions into a season of experimentation, Internet professionals, government professionals and regular people face important questions about the readiness of tools, institutions and individuals to turn optimism into operational change.

Beth Noveck, White House Deputy CTO for Open Government, is leading the effort to rethink public participation. She says the administration wants "to make government more relevant to people's lives" by providing more information, and to create "opportunities for people to share their expertise and participate in solving problems." Noveck believes that transparency and participation tools are most powerful when combined. "Data helps to focus people's attention," she says, "to develop actionable proposals based in empirical measures." Noveck and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) have already coordinated web discussions on declassification policy, FCC rules, use of web cookies, Pentagon Web 2.0 guidelines and recommendations on the Open Government Initiative.

Despite the innovation—and fanfare—behind the White House pilots in transparency and public input, leaders in online collaboration temper their enthusiasm with questions.

One of the participants in the White House's ongoing Open Government Initiative process is a little company by the name of Google, and it has some ideas to share with the executive branch on how government information can make itself more searchable and thus more accessible to the public. In comments submitted by Google Managing Policy Counsel Pablo Chavez (via the fusty old-fashioned Federal Register channel, rather than the blog/wiki-enabled online OGI process), Google makes the case that consumers and citizens are very often going to use Google as an interface onto government information, rather than any one .gov website or data tool. Government data that is hidden to Google and other search engines is effectively hidden from many of the people whom it might benefit and inform. From Google's submitted comments...

Phase III -- the drafting phase -- of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Open Government Initiative (OGI) has begun with a period of collaborative drafting using Mixed Ink, the group writing platform we've touched on here a handful of times in the past. OSTP is asking for open-government recommendations to come in the form of actionable, measurable prescriptions: all agencies should do X, and the metric for success or failure will be Y. The substance seeding this drafting phase is drawn from the suggestions produced during the project's two earlier public phases, as shaped and interpreted by OSTP -- as well as commentary captured from a wiki used by government employees to participate in the process. This is the last of the public phases of the OGI process, but not the last stop on the road: Deputy CTO for Open Government Beth Noveck blogs that what results from the Mixed Ink-powered drafting phase "will inform the drafting of an 'Open Government Directive' to Executive Branch agencies."

Drafting runs through Sunday, while voting on the submitted suggestions continues until Monday, June 30th.

Over on the White House blog, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and Michael Fitzpatrick from the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Policy (a.k.a. OIRA) plant a bit of a flag in the ground with a post calling out the "existing practices" that conventional wisdom is beginning to eye as potential roadblocks to open and participatory government. The interesting two-sides-of-the-coin here are that the very policies Kundra and Fitzpatrick are calling into question were, at the time they were enacted, intended to make the United States government more open and participatory:

• The 1990 Paperwork Reduction Act. PRA was a good government bill meant to make engaging with government less onerous and open up the democratic process. But its documentation requirements might hamper the government use of wikis, blogs, and the like.
• The 2000 "Federal Cookie Policy." Issued as a OMB memorandum, the policy was meant to protect citizens' privacy, but it can get in the way of using some web 2.0 technologies -- YouTube, for example.
• "Records Management Law." It's not immediately clear (to me, at least) what Kundra and Fitzpatrick are referring to here, but they seem to be interested in making it easier to comply with guidance from the National Archives and Records Administration.
• The 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act. FACA was aimed at regulating the influence 'unofficial' advisors might have on the presidency. Today, it might limit the ability of, say, volunteer programmers to contribute their work to the federal government.

Kundra and Fitzpatrick are asking for your thoughts on whether or how to pursue changing these laws and policies.

Taking a close look at the White House, it's not difficult to see that they're fairly quickly shifting focus from the "Why?" aspect of open government -- that is, making the case for why a more participatory, collaborative, and transparent democracy is a positive, progressive development -- to a "So, how exactly do we go about doing this open government thing?" phase. They're setting their mission big. If they ultimately succeeded with even part of what they have in mind, it's probably on the safe side of hyperbolic to say that they would be putting the United States at the leading edge of participatory democracy. Below are a trio of insights from the last few days into what the Obama Administration is thinking, doing, and inviting us to do on the way to a future of more engaged and engageable government...

The quality of the dialogue on the Office of Science and Technology Policy's Open Government blog continues to improve, day by day. Clearly, the folks running the show are learning as they go, and trying to tweak how they blog about policy so that a useful conversation can flourish. But the process still leaves a lot to be desired, which may be more the fault of the topic at hand and the tools available, then the specific choices being made by the OSTP's team. Should we drawing big conclusions from this experiment? Or should we treat is a big experiment, but just one of many that need to happen before we can draw firm conclusions about the prospects for involving the public in developing policy using online collaboration tools? (I think the latter.)

Here are some examples of what I mean. First the good news: The majority of the comments now appearing on the OSTP blog are serious efforts by citizens, and in some cases domain experts, to engage with the questions on tap...

Right now, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's blog is in the middle of the second, "Discussion," phase of its unique effort to engage the public online in fleshing out the details of President Obama's Open Government Directive. After a bit of a rocky start, with a flood of semi-disruptive posts from "birthers," the conversation seems to be finding its footing. A new post by Robynn Sturm, titled "Transparency: Open Government Operations," raises some interesting questions and is generating equally stimulating answers. She writes:

As the Obama Administration contemplates new approaches to making government more open, we want to hear from you. What do you – the non-profit fighting in the public interest, the company creating jobs for Americans, the journalist engaged in newsgathering, the teacher of civics, the mother and interested citizen – need to know about the way government works in order to feel more knowledgeable, to be empowered to participate, and to hold government accountable?

Over on the Office of Science and Technology blog, Deputy U.S. CTO Beth Noveck puts a lid on the brainstorming phase of the White House's Open Government Initiative by imposing structure on some of the submissions that have flowed out of the all-ideas-on-the-table portion of the OGI experience. OSTP has helpfully sorted the open-government ideas they appear to be focusing on most closely into the "mindmap" on the right. In case your eyesight's somewhat less than a superhero's, here's a big version. Noveck subsequently blogged a preview to OGI Phase II -- the discussion phase.

A related note: the White House's open government folks are now on Twitter -- @opengov.

The folks at the National Academy of Public Administration who are managing the White House's Open Government Initiative brainstorm site have posted a call to participants for help. Specifically, help in voting down "postings you feel are counterproductive to maintaining a free-flowing exchange of ideas" and help in flagging content "that you feel is duplicative or inappropriate to the discussion."

While the post speaks only in general terms, it's clear that it's a reaction to the flood of posts in recent days from people raising questions about President Obama's birth certificate and his eligibility to be president (whom I derisively referred to as the "birthers.")

Right now, the Open Government Dialogue created as part of the Obama administration's new initiative to engage the public in a participatory discussion of ways to make the federal government more transparent and collaborative looks like it is being overrun by the so-called "birthers"--conspiracy nuts who think the President isn't legitimately a U.S. citizen. Here's a screenshot of recent tweets from @ogovbrainstorm, which automatically shows which ideas have recently gotten 20 positive votes or more...