Photo caption: Just open it!

Last week, Andrea DiMaio pointed out some similarities in the “open government” ideas being submitted to federal agencies through their IdeaScale pages, indicating that the similarities are symptomatic of a flawed approach to public engagement.

Luke Fretwell at GovFresh called Andrea out (among other critics) for not offering any alternative approaches along with their criticism. Luke has asked all interested to offer their ideas, and this is my submission.

It’s worth noting that this first round of idea gathering isn’t even over yet, and it’s far too soon to judge its success. I do, however, have a blog, and it’s an excellent way to pass premature judgements on others’ work, so here goes…

These dialogs are too big #

Normally, I’m against big things. I think the world’s going to be solved by millions of small things.
— Pete Seeger

This quote has been bouncing around my head for the past year or so, ever since I first heard it around Obama’s inauguration. It came to mind when I read the Open Government Directive in December because the directive is a big thing that asks agencies to do big things, and I’m skeptical of big things.

That said, I consider the Open Government Directive to be a good big thing because it’s a needed big kick in the pants. It’s great that so many people in Washington are excited to respond to it, but make no mistake: most agencies wouldn’t be opening up without the directive.

Also, despite any limitations of IdeaScale, most agencies wouldn’t have such a robust tool without it or the guidance of the Citizen Engagement and Participation team at GSA. As Andrea has since pointed out, IdeaScale is an excellent—and low cost—way for agencies to experiment with openness. If it doesn’t work, awesome. We’ll learn from it and move on.

Oh yeah, ideas. Here:

#1 – Stop talking about “open government” #

We do ourselves a disservice when we talk about open government or transparency as if they were goals in and of themselves. They’re not. They’re means to accomplish greater things, like faster innovation or higher quality service.

Additionally, terms like “transparency,” or “open government” are probably lost on “the public.”

Agencies will get better submissions (and ultimately do better work) if they explain what aspects of their mission they’re trying to improve through openness. This will allow them to engage specific expert communities around their agency rather than the relatively small group of people who know what “open government” means.

The USPTO started using Peer to Patent not because it was open, but to improve the patent approval process—it just so happens that Peer to Patent is a great application of openness.

This approach isn’t the agencies’ fault, but is probably the result of instructions to allow the public to “provide input into the creation of the agency’s Open Government Plan.” Telling agencies to open up to the public to allow the public to tell agencies how to open up is probably too meta for most people to grasp.

#2 – Shine light on individual public servants #

Agencies should recruit or appoint staff to sort through ideas and publicly discuss the merits and faults of the ideas. I’m not suggesting that agencies publicly respond to every single idea (this would be paralyzing), but rather respond to trends or common themes among ideas. This is going to require a lot of work and will subject agency staff to some scrutiny, but I think it’s worth it for a number of reasons.

1. It gives citizens names and faces to identify with when presenting their ideas.

   I imagine many citizens are dissuaded from offering their ideas up to the “crowd” that IdeaScale or Google Moderator purport to harness. If they know that Jeffrey Levy (for example) is going to read and consider their idea, they may feel a little more encouraged.

   This idea, however, is not mutually exclusive from IdeaScale. It could easily sit on top of IdeaScale as a reminder that, “Yes, there is a real person at the agency reading your ideas. This is his name, email address, LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, etc.”

   Without disclosure like this, tools like IdeaScale can enable public servants to hide behind an algorithm. That’s hardly transparent.

2. It forces agencies to pick up where IdeaScale will leave off.

   IdeaScale works (in theory) because people can understand, more or less, how it works: you submit an idea and people vote it up or down; ideas that people like float to the top, burying the bad ideas. If the algorithm behind it were much more complicated, it would confuse users and they’d never use it.

   This simplicity is a double edged sword because it makes the tool easy for people to game, particularly by people willing to beg for votes on their ideas. Others have pointed out how the simplicity of its design also creates a bias toward early idea submissions. My point is that we should not rely solely on these tools to identify the best ideas.

   If staff at agencies were required to vet and respond to submitted ideas in public, we would get more insight into what kinds of ideas the agencies can use, allowing us to provide more informed ideas in the future. Talk about the benefit of transparency! It also would require the agency to publicly defends its decisions.

3. It will inevitably foster stronger relationships among public servants and interested citizens—increasing the potential for future collaborations, idea sharing, and happy hours.

#3 – Do more, smaller things #

Openness should ultimately be baked into everything we do. We shouldn’t rely on dialogs or directives to talk to the public.

If a person ever asked me to join a “dialog” with them, I’d probably think I was in trouble; it sounds like something involving a lawyer, and that it’d take a long time.

I don’t have any research to back this up, but I don’t think that most people have time or interest in talking about policy making or bureaucratic operations; I think people are more likely to have ideas about how to shorten the lines at the DMV, or feel safer on planes, or make tax filing easier.

Instead of inviting citizens to help us by inviting them to dialogs, we should ask for their help at the point of interaction, when they’re already thinking about us. By opening ourselves up to feedback on discrete things, we’ll get more actionable information to use to improve those things. A flaw of large scale dialogs is that they tend gather a lot of unfocused anecdotal information that’s difficult to quantify and apply.

Every government web page, service, tool, brochure, and program should come with an invitation for citizens to help us make it better. In my perfect world, these invitations would even include names and contact information of a public servant accountable for the quality of the web site or service in question.

This might sound preposterous, but I prefer audacious, like hope. For the Open Government Directive to accomplish real change, it will require a dramatic shift in how we do business and interact with the public. I’m not recommending this because I believe in openness for openness’s sake, but because I believe that closer interaction with the public and more accountability from agencies will help us build a better government.