Manor, Texas, is endeavoring to transform itself into an innovative, efficient, and well-functioning bedroom community of Austin by rebuilding its institutions from the ground up with the help of free or cheap digital tools. (I was intrigued by what the town was up to and blogged about it last year.) Manor has become so renowned for its creative use of technology that it has become something of a tourist attraction—bringing in visitors, for example, who can use their cell phones to scan the pictographic bar codes (known as QR codes) posted on historic sites and get free, automated guided tours. The city also now runs “See, Click, Fix”—a free customer service platform that enables citizens to report pot holes, downed trees, and traffic lights in need of repair—a service that has heretofore only existed in large cities like New York and San Francisco. And Manor runs Spigit, an innovation platform through which it invites citizens to come up with ideas for running the town better. Members of the public whose ideas are implemented win prizes such as the privilege of riding along with the sheriff for a day.

Alexis De Tocqueville observed about 19th century America that: "In towns it is impossible to prevent men from assembling, getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves. Towns are like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members. In them the people wield immense influence over their magistrates and often carry their desires into execution without intermediaries.” This can-do spirit is in evidence today in the “Municipal Makeover” underway in Manor.

And the movement is spreading. City officials from Manor and volunteers from around the country, for example, have “adopted” De Leon in northern Texas, in order to provide it with a makeover of its own. Instead of a new wardrobe and makeup, De Leon gets a “City in a Box”—a package that includes digital citizen participation tools and assistance implementing a new website, ideation platform, records management system, and more. The conference taking place today and tomorrow will feature concrete “how to” lessons from that makeover.

As Parag Khanna, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, recently wrote, “cities are the world’s experimental laboratories.” And what’s taking place in Texas is just one example of the new efforts under way to build tools, train and organize volunteers, and design programs for institutional innovation at the local level. Among them:

• Open Plans, a nonprofit technology organization focused on local open government. The group coordinates the multi-city Open311 initiative and supports open source mapping tools for local communities.
• Civic Commons, a nonprofit helping cities and states share code effectively. It is working to adapt existing codes—such as those in use by San Francisco's Enterprise Address System, the Federal government's IT Spending Dashboard, and the National Archives Federal Register tools—available to others for use in and by their local communities.
• CityCamp is an “unconference” focused on innovation for municipal governments and community organizations. The inaugural CityCamp in Chicago in January 2010 brought together over 100 people from local governments, community organizations, developers, and journalists from across the United States, Canada, and the U.K. There are now CityCamps scheduled for London,  San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Russia, the "Front Range" cities of Colorado, and Boston, with more expected to come online soon.

One thing that is neat about these approaches is that they are largely scalable. For example, the CIOs of the seven largest cities in America (informally known as the "Gang of 7") have been convening every two weeks to exchange best practices for municipal innovation. And now a World E-Governments Organization of Local and City Governments has started as well. Cities from Amsterdam to Vladivostok are also gathering to identify strategies for innovating in the way that they work.

One exciting advance in this area that I will be talking about today in Texas is a new online professional community-of-practice site for those who want to learn about Municipal Makeovers, get involved, and learn how to implement these or other tools in their towns. Known as BetaCities, it is an online community for local government employees and strategic partners, whose mission is to establish action-based starting points for local government agencies wanting to be cities of continuous self-improvement.

In this difficult economic time when institutions need to do more with less, the Obama Administration celebrates local innovators who champion open and collaborative ways of making hometowns more efficient and responsive to the needs of their citizens.

Beth Noveck is Deputy CTO for Open Government in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Thanks to an article in the newspaper, he came across a link for National Lab Day—a nationwide initiative to foster collaborations among volunteers, students, and educators—and signed up. Yesterday, at the East Side Community High School on the lower east side of Manhattan, Professor Davis taught 10th graders (as well as this U.S. Deputy CTO) how waste water is treated on an industrial scale. In keeping with the basic tenet of National Lab Day, this wasn't just a lecture. It was a hands-on experiment through which we learned how to clean and purify "contaminated" water—namely 100 ml of tap water that the good Professor had mixed with 18 g of dirt, 10 g of flour, 2 ml of salad dressing, and some dish soap that science teacher Joe Vicente had provided for the experiment.

This get-your-hands-dirty experiment can be traced in part back to last November, when the President launched the "Educate to Innovate" campaign to motivate and inspire students to excel in science, technology, engineering, and math. At that White House event, he announced the launch of National Lab Day and challenged Americans to get involved in a historic grassroots effort to bring hands-on learning to students by upgrading science labs, supporting project-based learning, and building communities of support for STEM teachers.

Since its launch the effort has quickly gained momentum, with National Lab Day projects now scheduled in every state, involving over 1,500 schools already and over 200 science and engineering societies and organizations representing millions of potential volunteers. National Lab Day matches volunteers with schools and teachers to coordinate face-to-face learning opportunities. New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who attended today's event, complimented the innovative approach of National Lab Day, which brings knowledgeable experts into America's middle and high schools to get kids interested science.

"Yo-Yo Ma is in New York today and he can visit five schools," Klein remarked. "But a program like National Lab Day can put a ‘Yo-Yo Ma’ of science and technology in every classroom." And you never know what these match-ups will lead to, he added. "I had a physics teacher in high school who helped me get a science grant that let me go to college."

And although Yo-Yo Ma was not part of today’s water treatment experiment, TV stars Tim Daly and Andrea Bowen turned up to add some chemistry to the chemistry. And of course, there was pizza.

May 12th is the official National Lab Day kick-off, but National Lab Day isn't just a single day. It's an ongoing, year-round, grassroots effort in participatory citizenship designed to encourage young people, as President Obama has said, "to be makers of things, not just consumers of things."

Students at East Side Community High School in New York learn how to clean up dirty water as part of a National Lab Day experience. (Photos by Beth Noveck)

Beth Noveck is U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer

Last month, the Administration issued its Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes to Promote Open Government. The Guidance provides a policy and legal framework for the use of prizes and challenges to promote open government, innovation, and other national priorities. Today the White House and the Case Foundation are hosting a summit on Promoting Innovation: Prizes, Challenges and Open Grantmaking. The day is organized into a combination of presentations and panels, breakout roundtables, and Ignite Sessions all designed to deepen our understanding of how to incorporate prizes and other innovative techniques into the way we solve complex economic and social problems.

There are over 200 public and private sector participants at this event, learning from one another how to bring innovation to policymaking.

You can see the program here. While the speeches and panels will be broadcast online next week, today you can watch live interviews with the speakers, including Sonal Shah of the Domestic Policy Council, Peter Diamandis of the X-Prize Foundation, Bonin Bough of PepsiCo, and Jim Shelton of the Department of Education.

We welcome your participation in this event. Before and during the sessions, you can submit questions via Twitter, using the hashtag #opengov, via email at casesoup@casefoundation.org or by using the interactive chat window on the Case Foundation website available during the sessions.

Beth Noveck is United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director of the White House Open Government Initiative.

Transparency

Transparency is one of the core principles of democracy. By communicating what we do and how we do it, we can foster accountability and trust in government.  This is why it is exciting that Housing and Urban Development is recording all public events and making them available online. The Department of Education is publishing Secretary Arne Duncan’s schedule for all to see.  Social Security is unveiling new tools on its website to help people (including Spanish speakers) more easily find information and services on the web and, in the event they aren’t web-literate to schedule an in-office appointment.

The agencies have also been tasked with making the data and information they hold available online in open formats. The Department of Labor announced the release of its new Online Enforcement Database – making all workplace safety data searchable and available in one place  and, perhaps more important, a schedule with accountable milestones for identifying and posting even more data. Health and Human Services is publishing a large-scale community health data set -- a wealth of easily accessible, downloadable information data on community health care costs, quality, access, and public health. 

Department of Justice is building a “Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Dashboard” to “shine a light” on the government’s compliance with FOIA. Not only will this visual report promote transparency, it should encourage Departments to compete to improve their FOIA compliance. Already two more Departments -- Health and Human Services and Department of Energy -- announced new FOIA programs in their plans to ensure that the public gets the information they request faster.

Participation

The agency open government plans also detail how government officials (without the need for legislation, regulation, or new budgets) are breaking down barriers between government and the public and inviting greater public participation in agency decisionmaking.  For example, the Environmental Protection Agency is making citizen participation in its work the hallmark of its plan.  Planned community engagement projects include everything from urban waters to solid waste and emergency response. U.S. Department of Agriculture is also ramping up its participation efforts in connection with the rules by which the nation plans its national forests. Department of Energy is creating the first ever open energy information platform that not only provisions government data about energy but invites the public to participate and share its data in an effort to create more informed energy usage and promote energy savings. The National Science Foundation’s flagship is to invest in studying citizen participation best practices and thereby help every agency do more participation better!

Collaboration

Working together within departments, across agencies and with private sector partners is a fundament of the open government initiative, which looks for strategies to generate creative thinking and new ideas to address complex problems. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where I am at home, created a new physical office space -- we’ve gotten rid of walls and cubes -- and work in a collaborative physical environment to foster collaboration within OSTP. Department of Housing and Urban Development has committed to a collaborative effort across federal, state, and local government to share information and thereby prevent the spread of homelessness.   NASA has created the contributor license agreement, a special contract to encourage software developers to contribute to ongoing NASA projects and, in turn, have the benefit of access to NASA technologies. This is just one part of NASA’s participatory space exploration efforts that engage the public in the work and the fun of space activities. GSA is making a lot of this collaboration possible by supplying web-based collaboration platforms to every agency that wants one.

This is just a handful of the many and varied projects underway. Because each agency is doing its own plan, we will get the benefit of distributed innovation. One will try webcasting and another a data transparency initiative and then be able to learn from one another.

So please dig in! Adopt a plan. Read it. And tell us how we can do things better.  In the process, we hope to reinvigorate a shared sense of civic virtue born out of a common love for this democracy.

To find a list of all the plans go to: http://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/open/around
To read highlights of the plans go to: http://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/open/documents/flagship-initiatives

Beth Noveck is United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director of the White House Open Government Initiative

"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system," Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in 1932, "that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."  The Obama Administration is taking unprecedented strides toward creating the most open and accountable government in history. And in so doing, we’re learning from those states and municipalities, which are undertaking exciting experiments to bring transparency, participation, and collaboration to the way they work as well.

Inspired by the President’s call for more open government, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts launched its data catalogue, following in the footsteps of Washington, DC, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere around the country (as well as cities in Canada and the UK), to provide public access to information by and about government. What makes this exciting is not merely having transportation information available in machine-readable formats, but that professional and amateur enthusiasts can then get together, as they did last weekend, to create new software applications and data visualizations to better enable public transit riders to track arrival times for the next subway, bus, or ferry. Publishing government information online facilitates this kind of useful collaboration between government and the public that transforms dry data into the tools that improve people’s lives. (For another great example, check out what happened when we published the Federal Register for people to use.)

The National Association of State CIOs is helping to spur this movement toward greater data transparency at the state level by publishing “Guidance for Opening the Doors to State Data.”

Just as the federal government is using online brainstorming with government employees and the public to generate ideas for saving money or going green, state and local governments are also using new technology to tap people’s intelligence and expertise. The City of Manor, Texas (pop. 5800) has launched “Manor Labs,” an innovation marketplace for improving city services.  A participant can sign up to suggest “ideas and solutions” for the police department, the municipal court, and everything in between. Each participant’s suggestion is ranked and rewarded with “innobucks.” These innobucks points can be redeemed for prizes: a million innobucks points wins “mayor for the day” while 400,000 points can be traded for a ride-along with the Chief of Police.

Manor is also one of the few cities currently using bar codes (known as QR or Quick Response Codes) to label physical locations around town. These bar codes can be scanned with a mobile phone to communicate historical and touristic information, data about the cost of a municipal service, or emergency management information. Manor is experimenting with techniques for providing different information to different audiences. If a resident scans a QR code outside a home for sale, she gets the floor plan and purchase price; whereas the building inspector gets the inspection history; and the first responder gets information about the current occupant.

As more of these innovative projects that foster open government go live and achieve results, we look forward to showcasing some of them on our blog and eventually making details available on the Open Government Innovation Gallery.  Developers with new tools to offer to facilitate open government – including free social media applications -- should also check out Apps.gov and list their products (here’s how) for others to use. Openness and accountability are the responsibility of government at every level.  By getting out the word about innovations that help to realize open government in practice, we can both promote new experiments and help people find and re-use the best ones.

Visit the OSTP blog to comment on this post.

Beth Noveck is Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government

• Defining: If transparency is to be implemented meaningfully in government, we need to agree upon a more specific definition of what it means to be transparent. Drafting a set of principles, which explain what we mean by transparent data and transparent operations, helps us to do this.
• Prioritizing: Your government is looking for guidance about how to prioritize the different principles of transparency. While many decisions will not be either/or choices, some tradeoffs will be inevitable. We need to understand which buckets of principles make sense in a given context. Prioritizing demands understanding what each principle means in practice and then weighing the relative costs and benefits.

• Adopt the eight Open Government Data Principlesdeveloped in 2007 by an open government working group in Sebastopol, California, namely that data should be: complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine-processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary, and license-free;
• Adopt the Carter Center Plan of Action for the Advancement of the Right of Access to Information;
• Adopt "crowd-sourcing" as a principle, wherever it makes sense to evaluate data;
• Ask government agencies to explain all policy decisions and the rationales behind them in readable language (i.e., in plain English)

• Which of the above-mentioned principles – or others – should we adopt? Provide us with your insights into the costs and benefits of each. Let us know if we’ve missed the output of other working groups or governments who have previously created lists of principles that should be integrated into this discussion.
• Help us to flesh out what each of these potential principles would mean in practice. How do we articulate a single set of transparency principles with enough flexibility to apply Government-wide?
• Share your insights into how to prioritize principles relative to each other. For instance, as highlighted by our airline example, is it better for an agency to publish some data faster, possibly at the expense of structure and comprehensiveness, or to wait longer for a more complete roll-out? Help us to identify and weigh the pros and cons of such tradeoffs.
• Weigh in on the topic of if-and-when these principles should be treated as hard and fast rules versus as standards or norms. For example, rules might better promote clear accountability, while standards might allow for more flexibility and entrepreneurship within government agencies.

• Be succinct: We find that a short, well-structured comment is often easier for others to grasp and respond to than long laundry lists of ideas.
• Be topical: To focus the discussion, please post only on the topic of transparency principles. Unrelated comments may be flagged by community participants and then subject to removal by a moderator. You can find the terms of participation here.
• Be responsive: Build on what others have posted, tie your insights to previous comments whenever possible, and help us to drive this discussion forward.

1. Transparency Principles: How do we define transparency so that we can prioritize our policymaking?
   • Adopt 8 Open Government Data Principles (complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary, license-free);
   • Adopt Carter Center Plan of Action for the Advancement of the Right of Access to Information;
   • Crowdsourcing should be adopted as a principle and best practices around the use of crowdsourcing to evaluate data should be established;
   • Agencies should explain all policy decisions and the rationales behind them in readable language;
2. Transparency Governance: How do we institutionalize transparency across all government agencies and establish structures to ensure thoughtful and considered progress toward transparency?
   • Replicate Florida's model of an Office of Open Government;
   • Establish a Transparency Officer/Open Government Officer and interdisciplinary team in each agency whose job it is to inventory and proactively make data available to the public. Transparency officer must not be an information technology expert only but someone knowledgeable about legal frameworks, such as Privacy and Information Quality;
   • Create a data governance program/framework in each agency to evaluate data quality and priorities;
   • Seek public input on data to be made transparent;
   • Identify candidate agencies or programs as pilots for transparency;
   • Use Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) to bring together government and public researchers to collaborate on making data more accessible;
   • Confer transparency/open government awards.
3. Information Access: How do we improve the efficiency and effectiveness of access to government information? How do we improve the Government’s ability to disclose information pro-actively and bring down the cost and burden of compliance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)?
   • Impose penalties on agencies not following FOIA or tolerating excessive delays. Look at India’s approach, in which government officials become personally liable and must pay fines if they do not act in a timely fashion;
   • Use visualization tools to show timeliness of FOIA processing in real time and track which official has responsibility for the request at any given time, i.e. workflow management;
   • Post frequently requested categories of information;
   • Require agencies to accept FOIA and Mandatory Declassification (MDR) requests via email;
   • Simplify implementation of FOIA;
   • Implement requirement to post disclosed information in electronic reading rooms;
   • Paper duplication costs should be reasonable. Electronic duplication should be free.
4. Data and Metadata: What technological approaches might be used to improve access to Government data? What Government-wide approaches to data and metadata should we be undertaking? How can we improve the usefulness of Data.gov, the Government’s new platform for access to data?
   • Inventory and prioritize agency data for publication in open, downloadable formats;
   • Set agency targets: by a given date, X percent of non-sensitive agency data should be online;
   • Use Data.gov as a repository of newly declassified information;
   • Make contributed data subject to a waiver of copyright and database rights using the "CCO" scheme from Creative Commons;
   • Standardize discovery and method calls to data sets;
   • Offer a crawling program to identify data that agencies could make available;
   • Establish a monitoring program to ensure that sensitive data is not released;
   • Collaborate with private sector on conferences on visualization to design tools for Data.gov;
   • Adopt data dictionaries to ensure that terms have the same meaning across agencies;
   • Adopt better software for comparing relevance and meaning of documents to make government information more searchable;
   • More RSS data feeds and other points of access to government information;
   • Government should create permalinks on the paragraph level to make documents easier to cite;
   • Maintain a transparency dashboard to show progress toward transparency, e.g. the number of documents released;
   • Bring government services online and make them reusable by the private sector; if citizens own the services they should be able to build on top of them. This requires a "Services Oriented Architecture" approach (see: VA Loan Guaranty example);
   • Digitize all government research reports and make them available free via NTIS (the National Technical Information Service);
   • Convert Depository Libraries around the country into Regional Data Centers;
   • Make the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) the off-site electronic backup data center for all agency e-record systems.
5. Open Government Operations: What are the strategies for making the workings of government more open and accountable? How do we balance openness and other constraints, like privacy and efficiency?
   • Create a "MyGov.gov" customized data feed/alert system that reaches across all federal agencies; i.e. create a "Citizens Portal";
   • Publish a directory of who works in government. Agencies state there are legal issues and policies in place that prohibit them from posting their organization charts. Changing this might help increase transparency;
   • Publish a list of everyone who meets with the President;
   • Allow government employees to speak to journalists more freely to foster news-gathering;
   • Electronic voting machine hardware and software, from the machine in the polling booth to the collection systems used to collate results, should be subject to publication and verification;
   • Executive branch documents, such as the Federal Register and the Compilation of Presidential Documents, should be made available in downloadable and accessible formats;
   • Use innovative, new technology to create more transparent, effective, and efficient procurement strategies;
   • Require that all public agency meetings be webcast. Require that all Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) meetings be webcast;
   • Create weekly progress reports in which government employees rate and rank each other's announcements as a mechanism to select the best ideas to report to the Secretary;
   • Every agency should develop a "Web 2.0" communications strategy to set forth how it will use new media to accomplish its mission;
   • Identify common innovation platforms -- the basic frameworks needed across agencies for open government -- and invest in building those.