Open Government

Research Note: Is Your Government Open or Closed? October 2011 4 Principles of Government 2.0 Absent from OGP Measurement System Government 2.0 or “Gov2.0” in 21st century politics commonly refers to technology-based initiatives for building transparency, participation and collaboration into the government process, specifically using architectures founded on social media, cloud computing, and open data. Over the past two years there has been a determined commitment in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia to use these technologies to drive forward the concept of “openness” with official directives encouraging federal agencies to release more government data, to the use of contests to spur citizen participation in the government process. These governments and many others engaged in Government 2.0 activities, depicted in Figure 3, are now working to promote greater engagement through more interactive online collaboration and are promoting innovation in online and mobile public services to respond to changing expectations of their constituents. Likewise, open data is now central to having an effective voice, as citizens must be able to understand the state of their public services; governments will publish information about public services in ways that are easy to find, use, and re-use. Figure 3 - Government 2.0 Global Activity While the fundamental mission statement of the OGP includes the directive to “…harness the power of new technologies to make government more effective and accountable”, there is a definite lack of measures in the scoring systems that would drive this behavior. Many political crises over the last year have been attributed to the new media of the Internet; they are best exemplified by the political activists sites on Facebook of the Arab Spring, the anti-secrecy, web editorial site of Wikileaks that released the controversial diplomatic cables, and the Twitter sites that were used to organize mass protests such as the London riots. It is no wonder that Governments have become very wary and concerned over this disruptive technology. As any management consultant will point out – people behave as they are measured – as such leaving out any empirical metrics that would drive forward the adoption of collaborative new media technologies is a serious impediment to progressing truly open governance.