Maxine Teller and I had a brief conversation at GovLoop’s GovUp last night about what the goal of the OpenGov movement actually is (and how it’s currently rather ill-defined). As I’d been thinking along the same lines, I suggested that we start a public conversation around this idea and see what happens. This is the beginning of that.
As I am want to do, I’d like to start from a universal and very idealistic perspective. Therefore, I propose that our goal is not actually just to improve government, but that in fact we’re looking to improve society as a whole. Succinctly put, our actual goals are to create:
- citizens that are engaged in the activities of their governments, and
- governments that are efficient, effective, and responsive to the needs of their citizens.
Transparency, participation, and collaboration are necessary components of creating this, and while technology can help, we need to keep in mind that it’s only useful if it helps to meet these needs.
What do you think? What am I missing? Am I on track here or far afield?
Blog Posts, Front Page
Wayne Moses Burke
August 27th, 2010 6:44 pm
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This is certainly a conversation that needs to be had.
The second goal, “governments that are efficient, effective, and responsive to the needs of their citizens” seems to be more important than the first; the first seems to enable the second.
I’d like to offer a slight tweak to the first goal of having “citizens that are engaged in the activities of their governments”. I’d rephrase that goal as “creating simple, well-known, and effective channels for citizens to participate in the government decisions that shape their lives.”
This change puts our focus on getting these channels built and letting citizens know that they can use them, rather than actually getting citizens to use them– it’s a minor but important difference. Our focus is not on changing citizen behavior but instead providing them with options.
In other words, the open government movement will still be a success if it creates effective channels that citizens choose to not use. Here’s why: the advantage of representative government is that citizens are not required to spend time governing themselves. This frees citizens up to pursue life, liberty, happiness, and American Idol.
If we create effective channels that citizens choose to not use, it’s either because
1) everything is fine in their opinion, and their government is performing well (success) or
2) citizens do not know the channels exist (failure). That’s why it’s critical that these channels are also well-known and wording to that end should be included in the goal.
Here is the rephrasing again: “creating simple, well-known, and effective channels for citizens to participate in the government decisions that shape their lives.”
I agree that this is an important conversation and that the goal can be broadened from improving government to improving all of society by the instrument of improved government-citizen collaboration etc. One quickly gets into enabling activities since many improvments to the one lead to improvements to the other. For example, a more effective and efficient government might lead to more trust by citizens which in turn would feed back to government being enboldened to take more ambitious steps to handle difficult issues.
Lucas provided a different example of the relatioship. So there are 2 way causality here which needs to be considered as one moves from goals to enabling tactics.