Realizing Transparency 2.0 Through Social Media
This week’s discussion topic on the National Conference on Citizenship’s (NCoC) recently revamped Web site is about transparency in government, which is an aspect of social government that is quickly evolving.
I would argue that transparency 1.0 is the ability for citizens to see what is going on in their government. In 1966, President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law. In 1994, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., became the first member of Congress to launch a Web site. And just last month, California launched a platform to post statements of economic interest and travel expense claims for heads of state departments.
These are all advancements in transparency 1.0, allowing citizens to understand their government and access information about it. Non-governmental organizations have also played a crucial role, from the 1979 launch of C-SPAN to the launch of opencongress.org in 2007.
But 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.”
Lisa Rosenberg, one of NCoC’s experts from the Sunlight Foundation writing on the topic, said that the goal of transparency should be to “open up discussions, improve the deliberative process, and help our democracy live up to its potential.”
In this era of transparency 2.0, no longer will placing a window between the people and their government suffice. That glass needs to be removed. The people ought to be able to reach inside and fiddle around. Our expectations of transparency in government, which were once limited to observation, have expanded to include participation.
Progress is being made on this end also. Within the last year, citizens had the opportunity to @reply their member of Congress on Twitter, post a video response to his/her YouTube channel, or even ask the President a question in an online town hall. Like before, organizations have also paved the way for transparency, such as publicmarkup.org, where citizens can deliberate about and propose suggestions to specific legislation.
The folks at Government 2.0 camp, which recently convened in Washington, D.C., created this video of their top 10 recommendations for government transparency. In particular, three of their recommendations seize on the spirit of transparency 2.0: the release of open, searchable data, a single portal in which all federal Freedom of Information requests and responses can be made and viewed in real time and the ability for citizens to speak directly with the President (and presumably other elected officials).
In a 2008 Cisco white paper, “Realizing the Potential of the Connected Republic,” the authors wrote, “In a world where sharing information has become vastly easier, public agencies should aim to make as much information as possible available, and then enable citizens to give feedback on this information and to see the feedback of others.”
The report cites an example in London borough of Redbrige, in which more than 3,200 residents participated in an online forum called “You Choose” about capital improvements in the town and different ways to fund them.
The authors note, “The aim of the initiative was not direct democracy, but to open up the council’s budgeting process and enable citizens to engage in a dialogue with the council about what should happen.”
Through relatively new platforms such as Google Moderator (recently used by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., for example) or an up-and-coming start-up deepdebate.org, government can solicit, channel and use feedback from the public like never before. This is the way forward for transparency 2.0.
Thus, whether it is as simple as leaving room for comments on a government blog (see the Department of Homeland Security’s “Leadership Journal”) or as massive as a national online deliberative discussion about a given issue (soon to come?), transparency 2.0 will be the backbone of a more social government. Citizens who are more empowered to get involved and public officials who are better informed to make decisions are few of the many benefits we have to look forward to.
