Tag Archives: open government

Apps for the Environment: Can developers and government talk? [WEBINAR]

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Over the past two years, entrepreneurs, developers and government agencies have collaboratively explored the power of open data to improve health or transit data as open government fuel for economic growth. Now, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is looking to do the same with an Apps for the Environment challenge.

This Thursday at 4 PM EST, the EPA is hosting a webinar for developers to hear more from the community about what the government can do to make data more usable by developers. (Heads up, government folks: Socrata’s open data study found progress but a long road ahead, with clear need for improvement: only 30 percent of developers surveyed said that government data was available, and of that, 50 percent was unusable.)

I look forward to moderating the EPA webinar (register here) on Thursday. Listeners can expect to hear more about collaborative innovation in open government, crowdsourcing and challenges, and the sustainability of apps contests before we open up the discussion with Jeremy Carbaugh of Sunlight Labs and Michaela Hackner of ForumOne, the developers of DataMasher, the winner of Apps for America2.

If you’re interested in a different kind of public service through code, please tune in.

How should whistleblowing work in the age of transparency?

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Transparency movements have gone global. Open government, however, depends in part upon the ability of public servants and corporate insiders to blow the whistle on fraud, corruption or other conduct that is not in the interest of citizens or stakeholders. In the context of Wikileaks, the role of whistleblowing has taken on new meaning and scope in this age of transparency. Despite President Obama’s open government commitments, his administration has aggressively pursued whistleblowers over the past two and a half years.

It is in that context that the Advisory Committee on Transparency for the Transparency Caucus in the U.S. Congress hosted a public discussion on July 29, 2011 on the challenges federal whistleblowers face. Video of the hearing, provided courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation, is embedded below.

The panelists included:

  • Angela Canterbury, Director of Public Policy, Project on Government Oversight
  • Carolyn Lerner, Special Counsel, U.S. Office of Special Counsel
  • Christian Sanchez, Border Patrol Agent, Customs & Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security
  • Daniel Schuman, Moderator, Policy Counsel, the Sunlight Foundation
  • Micah Sifry, Co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum; author of WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency; Sunlight Foundation sr. technology advisor

People interested in government transparency will find it of considerable interest.

Even if the White House’s commitment to transparency is questioned, open government continues to grow globally, with new tools for transparency coming online every month.

Following Twitter and Facebook, White House experiments with LinkedIn for questions

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Over the course of the last year, the White House has experimented with each of the leading social media platforms to solicit questions and host conversations around events. This week in Silicon Valley, the nation could watch online to see if a LinkedIn forum could generate useful results. The White House Council on Jobs and Effectiveness hosted a session on job creation that featured questions submitted from LinkedIn. Archived video from the forum is embedded below, with an updated discussion at the end of the post.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/flash_media_player/player5x2.swf

Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra wrote more about this Palo Alto jobs session at the White House blog:

I’ll be joining Jobs Council Members Steve Case, John Doerr, Sheryl Sandberg, as well as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on a panel moderated by the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine Chris Anderson. The panel will focus on issues that impact entrepreneurs and high growth businesses, as well the importance of innovation, entrepreneurship and high growth companies to our economy. During the Session, Council members will respond to questions and comments from people across the country submitted via LinkedIn and Facebook.

Add your voice to the dialogue by sending us your questions and comments:

  • Right now, you can post your questions and comments on the White House LinkedIn group. Here’s what we’re looking for:
    • What questions do you have for Steve Case, John Doerr, Reed Hastings and Sheryl Sandberg about accelerating growth and job creation for innovative companies?
    • What policy recommendations would you want them to consider for their report to the President?
    • What are some of the obstacles you’re facing with regard to your workforce and finding talent?
    • What have you found to be successful practices in hiring and managing your workforce
  • Watch live on Tuesday, August 2nd at 1:00 p.m. ET/ 10:00 a.m PT on www.whitehouse.gov/live

More platforms, more questions?

The event comes with some context. In January, AskObama was on YouTube. In April, President Obama talked with Mark Zuckerbeg in what one could call the first “Facehall.” In July, Jack Dorsey moderated the first Twitter @Townhall.

Given that LinkedIn is focused on professional social networking, it’s not unreasonable to look there for questions on job creation. Whether tapping into that network works any better for soliciting questions or moderating them then ideation tools like Google Moderator, IdeaScale or UserVoice is unclear, given that the forums are not expressly designed for that purpose.

New social media platforms have emerged over the past year, of course. As the White House continues to experiment with social media, perhaps we’ll find out if Quora does politics at the White House — Congressional leaders like Paul Ryan are already there — or if the communications team tries a Google Plus Hangout, as Newt Gingrich tried earlier this summer. Given the interest that White House staff expressed in the latter platform during the White House tweetup at the recent (real life) presidential town hall at the University of Maryland, keep your eyes open.

UPDATE: Chris Anderson did a creditable job pulling from the questions on LinkedIn. After listening to them posed at the forum, however, it’s not at all clear to me that using a LinkedIn group was the ideal way to enable a distributed audience to submit questions. There are many platforms that have been built specifically for ideation that might make more sense to apply. Still, as a first experiment, this produced a series of questions for the moderator to pose that might not otherwise have been posed.

The WhiteHouse blog post on the forum of tech leaders included a statement from Chopra about three clarifications to existing immigration policies that can enable entrepreneurs to start companies here:

“First, we’re clarifying what it means to declare entrepreneurship in the national interest. Second, in an H1B visa, typically temporary in nature, the question is: Can you come in as an immigrant founder? If there’s a way to demonstrate that there’s a separation between your role as founder and that role as employee, you have the ability to pursue that existing avenue. Third, we have a category that exists called the EB5 visa for immigrant investors. If you’re willing to invest 1 million dollars in the United States and create 10 new jobs you have the authority to come in under this condition. But it’s a complicated process and we only use half the alloted slots. So we’re streamlining the process and making this more attractive for folks who want to create jobs in industries for the future”

 

New York City looks to an open government hackathon to redesign NYC.gov

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This week, Luke Fretwell suggested that “instead of building apps, civic hackathons should focus on redesigning websites, then turning them over to gov.” Today in New York City, the first day of the Revinvent NYC.gov hackathon started work on just that. (NYC had been working on this open government event long before Fretwell’s suggestion, but the confluence is worth noting.)

Tomorrow, the world will see what prototypes the Big Apple’s civic developers have co-created today, armed with NYC government demographic information and NYC.gov Web analytics.

They’re using a combination of digital and analog tools, including blackboards, projection screens, laptops and Post-Its. You can track the progress of the hackathon over at the NYC Digital Tumblr.

The formula here seems to be: Reserve space, provide coffee, bagels, electricity and Internet access and use the power of modern social networking, publishing tools and the New York City Mayor’s to convene the community.

If New Yorkers end up with a rethought, redesigned and relaunched NYC.gov, maybe other cities will try out that formula themselves.

For more on New York’s effort to become the nation’s premier digital city, learn more about how the Big Apple is thinking about architecting a city as a platform and citizensourcing smaller government.

[Photo credit: Colin Raney]

NASA launches new open government site with open source tools

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In one of the first posts on NASA’s newly relaunched open government blog, open government analyst Ali Llewellyn writes more about why adopting open government is important now, with a nod to Tim O’Reilly’s essay on “government as a platform.”

…OpenGov is not just data transparency or technology use. “Open government is an innovative strategy for changing how government works,” Beth Noveck, the original director of the White House Open Government Initiative, explains. “By using network technology to connect the public to government and to one another informed by open data, an open government asks for help with solving problems. The end result is more effective institutions and more robust democracy.”

From the beginning, democracy was supposed to be participatory. Thomas Jefferson noted in a letter how he envisioned a government where “every man…feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.”

In the service of that vision, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration continues to extend its journey into the open government stratosphere with the launch of a redesigned open.nasa.gov. The new site complements nasa.gov/open – but doesn’t replace it. (The /open sites that exist on federal .gov websites are a direct result of the Open Goverment Directive issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget in 2009.)

The new NASA open government is a beautiful departure from standard NASA websites. In fact, it’s a lovely move away from the Web design citizens encounter at most of the thousands of federal .gov sites. In part, that’s because the new NASA open government site is built upon General Service Agency-approved technologies and the same open source platforms ( like WordPress) that you’ll find at top-notch blogs like BoingBoing. (Or Govfresh). All due credit to Nick Skytland, Chris Gerty and Sean Herron for their hard work coding and designing the site as well. Skytland, who now heads up open government at NASA, wrote in to share his vision for the site and make a request:

After months of development and many discussions, we are very excited to announce the official public launch of open.nasa.gov. The site is a collaborative platform for the open government community at NASA to share success stories and projects related OpenGov from around the agency. The content on this site is written by NASA employees and contractors (just the core OpenGov team right now). We will be highlighting the ways that transparency, participation, and collaboration are being embraced by NASA policy, technology, and culture, and the future that becomes possible because of that commitment. We would love your feedback on the site. Please let us know if you have any issues with the site so we can fix them. The site works on most browsers, but we are still working out issues with Internet Explorer.”

Aside from WordPress, the technology behind open.nasa.gov includes:
Techs used:

  • A WordPress theme by Landau Reece called Protean 1.0
  • MySQL
  • Apache
  • The Disqus commenting system
  • The UserVoice feedback collection tool

As I reported yesterday, NASA’s open government story now includes supplying the innovation behind OpenStack and Nebula. That said, while the technology behind the new NASA open government site and other initiatives is important to recognize, it has to be valued in terms of its ability to both host conversations and feature the people behind it. As NASA’s open government story evolves, cultural changes will be important to track, along with any technical milestones driven by open source or efficiencies driven by tightening budgets.

A note on FOIA

One of the interesting decisions that British Columbia’s government made in its adoption of open government was its decision to separate good government data, associated with transparency and accountability, from open government data, associated with innovation and co-creation.

NASA’s open government site makes no such distinction, with the link to Freedom of Information Act requests buried down at the bottom of the open data page. NASA’s open government plan includes aspirational goals of further reducing its FOIA backlog and creating a “single, Web-based system for handling all FOIA requests across the 13 NASA locations.” If the agency can do as well with that system as it has with the design, communication and coding embodied this new site, its open government team will be able to celebrate more good government achievement alongside its explorations into citizen science, random hacks of kindness, education and open data.

OpenCongress 3.0 empowers citizens to contact their legislators

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Over the past 48 hours, the volume of citizens trying to contact Congress regarding the debt ceiling and budget debate has overwhelmed Congressional websites and Capital Hill switchboards. Citizens that want to reach their member(s) of Congress now have a powerful upgrade to one of the best options online: an improved version of Open Congress.

The upgrade of OpenCongress follows the launch of OpenGovernment.org in January, which is a free, open source online portal designed to make open state government available to citizens.

The new version of OpenCongress, which will launch this afternoon, puts new engagement features at the center of the site experience, writes in executive director David Moore via email. “It’s the culmination of more than six months of development, and the release is composed of two major new feature sets, Contact-Congress & MyOC Groups. One of the primary unique value propositions here is the ability to write all three of your members of the U.S. Congress at once, from one page, with our handy Message Builder, incorporating bill info & campaign contribution data and more, set it to public or private, and then send it *immediately* over email to official Congressional webforms. No other website offers this service in a web app that’s free, libre, open-source, and not-for-profit. As always, OCv3 is built by PPF with primary support from the Sunlight Foundation.”

Moore explained more:

“Clearly, with the debt ceiling debate and accompanying crashing and burning of Congressional communication channels, there’s a huge public demand for this service. OpenCongress is releasing it as a public service, free & open to everyone to be able to track & share their correspondence with federal legislators in a transparent public forum. MyOC Groups will complement Contact-Congress on OpenCongress by enabling greater self-organizing communities around bills and issues, as we’ve seen with unemployment extensions and other hot issues on our public comment forums and wiki.

We think it will be a popular new tool for government accountability, fighting systemic corruption, and facilitating a more deliberative democracy. And this is just the start, we hope, of a truly robust open API for constituent communication … but first, we need to give the public some user-friendly tools for sending compelling emails to their members of Congress, and then organizing their communities around them for greater effect.”

Moore told me that he expects the same features to be available on OpenGovernment.org as soon as the resources are available. Both OpenCongress and OpenGovernment are built using Ruby on Rails, so each will work well with the features. That message came with a hint: Moore is hoping today’s launch wil attract additional non-profit funding and support for more open-source development time to bring the OCv3 feature to OpenGovernment.

Moore also added that the Contact-Congress feature on OpenCongress is powered by open-
source software, the Formaggedon Rails plugin, which can be remixed &
applied to other websites & entities. More information on Formaggedon at the moment is available on today’s blog post on OpenCongress 3.0.

“Formaggedon will first be integrated with OpenGovernment,” writes Moore, which would make the site the only “free and open-source site that enables direct emailing of both your
state legislators, in upper & lower chambers. And subsequently we’ll bring over MyOG Groups.”

Obama: “I am absolutely convinced that your generation will help us solve these problems”

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Last Friday, President Obama hosted a townhall at the University of Maryland in College Park. At the end of his time on stage, he offered words addressed to the young students gathered in Ritchie Coliseum and those listening around the country:

…we’ve got a lot of young people here, I know that sometimes things feel discouraging. We’ve gone through two wars. We’ve gone through the worst financial crisis in any of our memories. We’ve got challenges environmentally. We’ve got conflicts around the world that seem intractable. We’ve got politicians who only seem to argue. And so I know that there must be times where you kind of say to yourself, golly, can’t anybody get their act together around here? And what’s the world that I’m starting off in, and how do I get my career on a sound foundation? And you got debts you’ve got to worry about.

I just want all of you to remember, America has gone through tougher times before, and we have always come through. We’ve always emerged on the other side stronger, more unified. The trajectory of America has been to become more inclusive, more generous, more tolerant.

And so I want all of you to recognize that when I look out at each and every one of you, this diverse crowd that we have, you give me incredible hope. You inspire me. I am absolutely convinced that your generation will help us solve these problems.

Unfortunately, one of my tweets on Friday reporting out the president’s words was missing two important words: “help us.” And, as it happened, that was the one that the White House chose to retweet to its more than two million followers. I corrected the quote and deeply regret the error, given the amplification and entrance into the public record. The omission changed the message in the president’s words from one of collective responsibility to shifted responsibility.

During the 2008 election, then Senator Barack Obama said that “the challenges we face today — from saving our planet to ending poverty — are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need all hands on deck.”

As president, finding solutions to grand challenges means that Obama is looking again to the larger community for answers. Whether he finds them will be a defining element in judging whether a young Senator from Illinois that leveraged Web 2.0 to become president can tap into that collective intelligence to govern in the Oval Office.

In 2011, there are more ways for the citizens of the United States to provide feedback to their federal government than perhaps there ever have been in its history. The open question is whether “We the people” will use these new participatory platforms to help government work better.

The evolution of these kinds of platforms isn’t U.S.-centric, either, nor limited to tech-savvy college students. Citizen engagement matters more now in every sense: crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, crowdmapping, collective intelligence, group translation, and human sensor networks. There’s a growth in “do it ourselves (DIO) government,” or as the folks at techPresident like to say, “We government.”

As institutions shift from eGov to WeGov, their leaders — including the incumbent of the White House — will be looking to students and all of us to help them in the transition.

Designing better government with open government at the CFPB

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Today, the local .gov startup goes live. While ConsumerFinance.gov went online back in February, today, on the anniversary of H.R.4173, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Board officially launches today, with Richard Cordray nominated to lead it. The Sunlight Foundation is liveblogging the Senate hearings this morning, for those interested.

Many questions about the future of the agency remain (Wall Street and Republicans have not been sparing offering criticism over the past year) but credit where credit is due: the new consumer bureau has been open to ideas about how it can do its work better. This approach is what led New York Times personal finance columnist Ron Lieber to muse last week that “its openness thus far suggests the tantalizing possibility that it could be the nation’s first open-source regulator.”

When a regulator asks for help redesigning a mortgage disclosure form, something interesting is afoot.

It’s extremely rare that an agency gets built from scratch, particularly in this economic and political context. It’s notable, in that context, that the 21st century regulator has embraced many of the principles of open government in leveraging technology to stand up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Elizabeth Warren, the architect of the agency, spoke to how open government, citizens and technology factor into the bureau’s work earlier this year:

Better government by design

Open government isn’t just about first principles for accountability, open data, social media, transparency, cultural change, citizen participation, innovation or feedback loops, however, though all of those factors matter. As the work of Code For America has shown this year, design matters in open government. Better citizen experience, communication and customer service depends on better design.

Lois Beckett aptly connected how the dots about why design matters to the CFPB’s work this week at ProPublica, where she wrote about the challenges the innovative financial regulator faces as it starts up.

…as the political battle rages on and media scrutiny focuses on Elizabeth Warren’s political future, little attention has been given to what the bureau has actually done. And its initial efforts are interesting, especially because they show a commitment to open government and real public engagement. (Ron Lieber noted that its blog actually accepts comments—”unlike, say, the White House’s.”)

The bureau’s mission is to create transparency in an industry dominated by confusing claims and mouse print. Good design isn’t just a perk here—it’s fundamental to the bureau’s regulatory efforts.

Case in point: One of the CFPB’s top priorities has been streamlining the federally required mortgage disclosure documents. If that sounds like a mouthful, it’s worse on paper: two separate, complicated forms that are confusing for customers and, the bureau contends, also burdensome for many mortgage servicers to fill out.

The goal is to replace them with a single, two-page document that clearly answers the questions: “Can I afford this mortgage?” and “Can I get a better deal somewhere else?”

Two of the potential designs for the new form each have a note at the top, in bold print: “You have no obligation to choose this loan. Shop around to find the best loan for you.”

The bureau’s other projects include improving transparency about credit card prices and fees, the exchange rates used for remittance transfers of money to other countries and the credit scores sold to consumers and creditors.

Using heatmaps and 13,000 clicks to understand pain points for mortgage disclosure? Data-driven government may have legs.

It’s not just the heatmaps: the CFPB reports that they read and analyzed the comments themselves. “There is symmetry here,” write the Web staff. “Heatmaps make it easier to understand and compare data. We want to improve disclosure so it is easier for consumers and lenders to understand and compare when they evaluate mortgage loans.”

As the newest .gov startup continues to scale, we’ll see if more experiments in open government design are given “freedom to fail,” a latitude that the father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, has hailed as an essential ingredient for government innovation. Stay tuned, and keep at eye on the CFPB.

GSA’s McClure: Cloud computing and open data in federal government aren’t going away

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To those in media, government or commentariot who think that cloud computing or open data might be going away in federal government after the departure of federal CIO Vivek Kundra next month, Dave McClure offered a simple message today: these trends are “inevitable.”

Cloud computing, for instance, will “survive if we change federal CIOs,” he said. “It’s here, and it’s not going away. McClure describes cloud computing as a worldwide global development in both business and government, where the economics and efficiencies created are “compelling.” The move to the cloud, for instance, is behind US plans to close or consolidate some 800 data centers,, including hundreds by the end of 2011.

Cloud computing was just one of five macro trends that McClure “listed at this year’s FOSE Conference in Washington, D.C. FOSE is one of the biggest annual government IT conferences.
inevitable. Here’s the breakdown:

1) Cloud computing

The GSA is the “engine behind the administration’s ‘cloud-first’ strategy,” said McClure, lining up the procurement details for government to adopt it. He said that he’s seen “maturity” in this area in the past 18-24 months. Two years ago, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was spending time at conferences and panels defining it. Now we have cloud deployments that are robust and scalable, said McClure, including infrastructure as a service and email-as-a-service.

Government cloud deployments now includes public facing websites, storage, disaster recovery andare beginning to move into financial apps.

2) Collaboration and engagement

The cloud is teaching us that once we free data, make it accessible, and make it usable, it’s
creating opportunities for effective collaboration with citizens, said McClure, noting that this trend is in its “early stages.”

3) Open data and big data

Data.gov has “treasure troves” of data that entrepreneurs and citizens are turning into hundreds of applications and innovations, said McClure. Inside of government, he said that access to data is creating a “thirst” for data mining and business intelligence that help public servants work more efficient.

4) Mobile

Mobile computing will be the next wave of innovation, said McClure, delivering value to ourselves and delivering value to citizens. Government is “entrenched in thinking about creation of data on websites or desktop PCs,” he said. That perspective is, in this context, dated. Most of the audience here has a smartphone, he pointed out, with most interactions occurring on the hip device. “That’s going to be the new platform,” a transition that’s “absolutely inevitable,” he said, “despite arguments about digital divide and broadband access.”

5) Security

As McClure noted, you have to include security at a government IT conference. The need for improved security on the Web, for critical infrastructure, on email and where ever else government has exposed attack surface is clear to all observers.

As White House tech talent comes and goes, open government continues to grow globally

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Kim Hart and Michelle Quinn published a new trends piece in Politico this morning, covering the exit of technology innovators from the White House. They tap into something important here that her sources, including Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation and Micah Sifry of techPresident, validate: some of the primary drivers of the technology initiatives that marked the Obama administration’s first two years in office have departed. Vivek Kundra, the nation’s first CIO, Andrew McLaughlin, Beth Noveck, Jim Kohlenberger, Scott Deutchman and Phil Weiser have all decided to move on. If you follow Govfresh and the O’Reilly Radar, you know we’ve been tracking many of those stories and people.

For instance, we were the first to report that in January, then White House deputy CTO for open government Noveck returned to teaching – and then to a new role advising the British government on open data. Former deputy CTO McLaughlin also left in January, transitioning to Stanford and the executive directorship of Civic Commons.

What’s the driver of these changes?

One is the normal transition between presidential terms. It’s unusual for senior staff White House to remain for all four years, due to the exhausting, round-the-clock schedule. Another is certainly the culture of the startup meeting the realities of government, as many publications and participants recognize. “I think tech entrepreneurs in government service is a bit of an oxymoron,” Miller said to Politico’s MorningTech. “Someone who is an entrepreneur is able to execute and test and fail. … I can imagine there’s a mismatch in DNA in terms of being able to control and execute as quickly as they can in the private sector.”

If you followed the path of Katie Stanton from Google to the White House to the State Department to Twitter, you’d find a case study in that reality. When Stanton reflected on Washington, explaining to Nancy Scola that “being used to a fast-paced environment that isn’t afraid to fail, where risk-takers are rewarded, government is just a very different environment.” If you pick up Steven Levy’s excellent book on Google, In the Plex, you’ll read a longer discussion of what happened when Googlers go to Washington and come up against the different culture inside the Beltway.

As MIT research professor Andrew McAfee aptly observed, this is Gov 2.0 vs the Beast of Bureaucracy, and it’s not a conflict that is going to be solved in a few years or in any single administration. The bloom is off the rose, in terms of the hopes in 2009 that the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, cloud computing and strategies from the private sector would radically change the federal government. The issues that plague government IT or Washington in general are a tough nut to crack, even for the brain trust in Silicon Valley. It’s even harder to attract and retain those minds to serve in government, as this Politico article narrates. If the country is going to solve the immense challenges that confront it in the 21st century, attracting and retaining geeks in government should be a national priority. The gap between Washington, VCs, entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley culture will have to narrow, whether through smarter immigration policies or innovation centers far outside of the Beltway.

When Quinn and Hart wrote that tech experts exit the White House, however, they for some reason failed to report that others have stepped up to take their place. I leave it to others to speculate about why that might be. For the moment, let the record show that there will be other techies serving in the White House.

For instance, Daniel Weitzner is the new White House deputy CTO for Internet policy, replacing McLaughlin.

Chris Vein is the new White House deputy CTO for open innovation, replacing Noveck.

And one of the biggest guessing games in government technology right now is who will fill Kundra’s shoes as the nation’s second CIO – a story which Politico itself has covered.

For many open government advocates, the shoes left unfilled that may cause the great consternation are those of Norm Eisen, the White House “ethics czar” that President Obama appointed to be ambassador of the Republic of Czech.)

There will be more tech talent that steps up to help the White House, but it’s safe to say they’ll be realistic about what can be accomplished in an election season where any decision will have political consequences.

Wither open government?

The departure of Kundra has caused a great deal of consternation in the open government community, particularly after a sensationalist op-ed on a Washington Post
by Vivek Wadhwa proclaimed the “coming death” of the movement. While Luke Fretwell forcefully rebutted Wadhwa here at Govfresh, essentially calling him wrong about open government, the lingering impression remains in the community that open government is in trouble. That feeling is part of longer continuum of criticism that reaches back into 2010, when it was already clear that open government was in beta and would continue to be, regardless of new open government platforms coming online or open data success at HHS. Advances and setbacks in open government will continue in Washington.

There will be new tech advisors that come into and leave the Obama administration (Harper Reed, for instance, has joined the campaign side as a CTO) but the future of open government won’t be borne solely upon their ability to innovate inside of government. Ultimately, in a new era of technology-fueled transparency, innovation and open government dawns around the world, it won’t depend on any single CIO or federal program. It will be driven by a distributed community of media, nonprofits, academics and civic advocates focused on better outcomes, more informed communities and the new news, whatever form it is delivered in. Advocates, watchdogs and government officials will have new tools for data journalism and, over time, open government. Globally, transparency movement is growing. Look to the launch of an Kenya’s open government data platform today and the lifted hopes of Kenya’s people for example, or new transparency initiatives in Britain for inspiration.

The growth of citizen science and open data hint at our collective future. Open government is about all of us, whether the White House steps up to the plate to reinvigorate its open government directive or not.