The Vision: Responsive Government
The purpose of government is to serve its citizens. Successful service requires understanding the needs of the citizens and having the appropriate culture, policies, and technology in place to meet those needs.
Adoption of the Internet and associated technologies is driving cultural change throughout society. Communication today happens at a speed and scale that was previously unheard of. Our goal is to ensure that one of the results of these shifts is responsive government.
Our Role: Facilitators
We are facilitators or change agents. We are outsiders, working with all the stakeholders to facilitate a smooth transition through these complex changes. Our work includes:
- Education We host events, provide resources, and consult with government entities to encourage and support both culture change and adoption of technologies that enable responsive government.
- Technology We create and support the creation of tools that enable responsive government through direct consultation as well as events that connects end users with developers.
- Research We establish metrics for gauging success, highlight best practices, and gather and analyze data to improve understanding and implementation of responsive government.
Our Guiding Principles
- Experience is more powerful than facts. Lead by example.
- Accomplishment requires implementation.
- Intelligent iteration may involve failure, but it leads to success.
- Solutions don’t lie at the extremes, they’re somewhere in-between.
- Focus on issues, not political parties.
- Culture change is easiest with:
- internal change agents,
- an understanding of the culture being changed,
- advice and support (or pressure) from the outside,
- tangible benefits for the individuals whose culture is changing,
- support from the top, and
- energy, ownership, and buy-in from the bottom.
Last updated: December 21, 2010
First posted: July 5, 2008
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This is a great website and wonderful resource for everyone to voice ideas and bringing one common voice together!! I like how everything (overall mission statement, values, goals) are laid out as top priority. Keep up the great work!!
So, at first look, I had some questions. Maybe they’ve been answered elsewhere, but here it goes.
1. How would you equally represent conflicted and diametrical apposed views fairly and equally?
2. What is success for you? What are the metrics you will use to measure success?
3. Even non-profits need money to cover operating costs. Who pays for this?
4. Why is this forum more important/better/more effective than simply writting a letter to a legislator?
Thanks, Francis and great questions, JHC. Let’s see if I can provide sufficient answers:
1. In brief, conflicting views would be represented by providing a platform for discussion, and not the discussion itself (all the gory details are on the Project One Overview page). As far as making certain that all sides are represented: that is something that comes from maintaining neutrality and working to engage all of the players – an important part of our plans for Community building.
2. Success will be measured by a number of factors, but primarily by the number of users and by feedback from those users on each solution. The details on how this would work have been well-developed yet, but that’s the gist. If you have ideas on this, please contribute them on the Plan page
3. Details on funding can be found on the Foundation Funding page and the Project One Funding page. In brief however, no funding would be accepted from governments of corporations in order to avoid potential conflicts of interest, leaving the burden on the prime beneficiaries of the service: constituents.
4. As described in detail on the Statement of Need page, this all started with the realization that there is not currently effective way to reach your legislator and know that the message will be heard unless you are willing to devote significant time to hanging out on Capitol Hill.
I hope this fills in some gaps. If you look at the resources I mentioned above and find them missing, let your voice be heard in that section.
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
[...] They are the ones who have made this step possible, and it is their convictions and belief in the vision that have turned the Open Forum Foundation from an idea into a fully-operational reality (you can [...]
Having learned of you at http://gov20camp.eventbrite.com/, I took the liberty of converting your mission statement into StratML format for inclusion in our collection at http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm#Nonprofits or, more specifically, http://xml.gov/stratml/OFF.xml Your mission is closely related to the purposes of the emerging StratML standard: http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm#DefinitionPurposes