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"Realizing Transparency 2.0 Through Social Media"

Posted on April 16th, 2009 by Craig Newmark

Ellen Miller writes about Transparency 2.0 citing a key paper by Nick Troiano with the subject title.

I feel this is really big, the genuine reinvention of government and have been speaking with people in government, and they really get it, and believe:

…the idea of transparency in government has evolved. This became apparent with a memo issued by President Obama
on his second day of office, which instructed the still to-be-named
chief technology officer to work with others heads of agencies to
develop an Open Government Directive in 120 day’s time.

Within this memo emerged what I would identify as transparency 2.0:
the ability for citizens not only to be able to see what’s going on in
their government, but their ability to participate and interact with
it. The memo said that government should not only be transparent in the
traditional sense, but also participatory and collaborative.

“Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions,” reads the memo.

NCoC writes, “The way the government operates is only half of the
transparency equation and trust in government must be balanced with …
participation in government processes.”

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2 Responses to "Realizing Transparency 2.0 Through Social Media"

April 16, 2009 at 5:10 am
Prokofy Neva says:

It's good to stress that transparency is only half the story, because the real struggle comes with what you do with the information.
There are so many of the world's problems that people think are solved just by delivering information about them to the right decision makers. But it's seldom an issue about "not knowing" about an issue that stops its resolution. It's nearly always about political will.
There are also many open questions as I've stressed about who is really running and benefiting from all this gov 2.0 transparency stuff — the webbed network of consultants and engineers in and out of government who code the stuff and have their hands on all the data streams and clouds, but who aren't elected or accountable and transparent *themselves* about what they are doing with "transparency in government".
So the government makes a wiki. Won't it be like all wikis, edited by the few, the obsessive, the unaccountable, at the end of the day?
So the stress needs to be put more on democratic participation, tools for interactivity, curating of debates in coherent fashion, formulating of issues for straw votes, etc.