Following Public Evaluation, OSTP Upgrades Open Government Plan

April 7th marked the latest milestone in the Obama Administration’s goal to make our government the most open, effective, and accountable in history. This was the date that 29 cabinet departments and major agencies posted their Open Government Plans—roadmaps with concrete milestones for transforming each agency and making each more transparent, participatory and collaborative. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released its own Open Government Plan for using openness and innovation to improve the use of scientific evidence in policymaking and the development of policies supportive of science and engineering. As OSTP Director John P. Holdren has written, the OSTP Open Government Plan "is not a final product but the first draft of a living document we are committed to revising and updating with your input." That's why, in the ensuing two weeks, we've read your feedback and evaluated our own plan against the requirements of the Open Government Directive. Today we are publishing that self-evaluation, together with Version 1.2 of our Open Government Plan (pdf) (you can view the edits we made from Version 1 here)—an improved version that fulfills both the spirit and the letter of the Open Government Directive.

Now our goal is to implement the commitments in our Plan and, for that, we need your ongoing help to devise specific strategies. Here are some are the highlights:

Transparency

• OSTP IN THE OPEN: We are opening up OSTP by starting to post profiles of many of our employees in their own words online in text and video so that you can know who we are and what we do.
• R&D DASHBOARD: Building on the work of USASpending.gov and IT.USASpending.gov, we are developing an R&D dashboard that will make it possible for anyone to track the government’s investment in basic research across the Executive Branch.

Participation

• OSTP BULLET-POINT BOOT CAMP: We are publishing a template to help you make policy proposals to us in the same format that staff uses to brief senior officials.
• PARTICIPATORY PCAST: This highlights the work we are doing to use new media to enable public participation in the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
• GEEKS FOR WONKS: A public-private partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to connect science, technology and innovation students with government officials to promote civic engagement by designing and building prototypes of civic software.

Collaboration

• OSTP BULLPEN: We showcase the new physical space we created to foster greater collaboration within the agency by tearing down the walls that divide us.
• NSTC COLLABORATION PLATFORM: This highlights the tools we are building to connect people across the agency.
• S&T EXPERT NETWORK: A public-private collaboration we are exploring to develop better ways of bringing scientific and technical advice to government from more sources, faster.

Tell us how we can do this better and faster. E-mail us at intheopen@ostp.gov or tweet us at @whitehouseostp using #OPENOSTP.

Beth Noveck is Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government

Eugene Huang is Senior Advisor to the CTO