Transparency gets all the press, but participation and collaboration are equally important
by Alex Howard | @digiphile | Originally posted on O’Reilly Radar; May 13, 2010
Transparency initiatives at the White House, one of the three elements of the Open Government Initiative, have received ample attention from mainstream media and groups like the Sunlight Foundation. The implementation of the other two elements, participation and collaboration, have not. Can citizens be empowered to participate and collaborate in governance?
To begin to answer that question, I spoke with Beth Simone Noveck, professor of law at New York Law School, director of the White House Open Government Initiative, and U.S. deputy chief technology officer. Noveck is the author of “Wiki Government,” where she wrote about using social networking technology to connect people to policymakers.
Read the full article and listen to interview with Beth Noveck
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Jaimey Walking Bear is on the Marketing team for Gov 2.0 Expo. He can be reached @gov2events or @jaimeywb
Cross posted from O’Reilly Radar • Original post by Alex Howard | @digiphile
Cammie Croft, former deputy director of new media at the White House, is taking on a new challenge as the director of new media at the Department of Energy.
In her new role, Croft will be upgrading elements of the IT infrastructure at an immense federal agency to enable her and her team to implement the digital tools for online engagement that she applied during the presidential campaign and the new administration’s first year in office. The Department of Energy has IT infrastructure challenges that exist within many government bodies at all levels, from an outdated content management system (CMS) to difficulties supporting blogs or commenting.
Croft explained it took 10 months for the White House new media staff to progress to the IT infrastructure they wanted for WhiteHouse.gov. While the new media team did relaunch WhiteHouse.gov on January 21st with a new blog, it was hosted on a different CMS. Eventually, WhiteHouse.gov was relaunched on the open source Drupal platform — but it took many months to get there. “We’d like to open up comments on WhiteHouse.gov,” said Croft, “but we’re wrestling with how to make it a constructive online community. We like to say: ‘How do we avoid getting to the place that YouTube comments are?’”
Read the full interview on O’Reilly Radar.
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Jaimey Walking Bear is on the Marketing team for Gov 2.0 Expo. He can be reached @gov2events or @jaimeywb
May 20th, 2010 |
