Open Government and Transparency in the Broadband Age

Open Government and Transparency in the Broadband Age

Openness and transparency of government are key pillars of democracy that pre-date the Internet. Data produced and collected by the government are the basic ingredients for governments to provide services, make policy, and be held accountable for their performance (Heeks, 1999, OMB, 2000). Efficiently managing this information is essential to effective governance, especially since most citizen interactions with government generate information. Each tax payment, license renewal, land purchase and birth, marriage, or death registration generates data that is collected, processed, stored, and analyzed by governmental entities. As a result of this deluge of data, many administrative reforms regarding transparency and openness have focused nearly exclusively on improving information management practices (e.g., processing and storing huge data sets). Since 2000, general access to publications and databases on government websites has improved (West, 2008). Table 1 offers data from West’s 2008 study of government websites illustrating this progress.

Yet to focus exclusively on the one-way push of information by government to the public is to miss the promise of innovative e-government techniques designed to transform this dynamic into a mutually beneficial, two-way collaboration. Transparency remains an important component of open government, but new technologies allow government to do far more than merely promote citizens’ passive consumption of government data. Broadband Internet access and the relatively wide diffusion of powerful computing devices allow citizens to become more active consumers, analysts and users of data.

Evolving Policies for Government Transparency and Openness

Laws and policies regulating how local, state and federal governments make information available to the public vary considerably, both in terms of the types of data that must be made available to the public and in how that data should be presented. To date, many state and local entities have adapted federal policies by mirroring them entirely or using them as a benchmark. Overall, the traditional transparency paradigm has long been a struggle between government secrecy and the right of the public to know, and has fluctuated based on the political strategies of the administration in power (Roberts, 2006).

In the United States, the transparency debate dates back to the late 19th century, a time when many Western democracies practiced making the process of lawmaking (e.g., decisions about taxing and spending) open to the public, but when many accepted the fact that much of government bureaucracy worked in secrecy. The federal government’s expansion via the New Deal began a decades-long shift in the historical transparency paradigm. In 1946, Congress enacted the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which, among many other things, created the Federal Register. The Federal Register represented one of the first affirmative attempts by the federal government to make certain types of information available to the public. Essentially, each federal department was required to publish basic information about “its organization, the rules it enforced, policy statements and procedures that guided its work, and its decisions” in the Federal Register. In 1994, the Federal Register was made available online, and its more modern look came in 2010.

In 1966, Congress enacted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which gave the public access to the general records of federal agencies. In particular, FOIA provides citizens with the power to request that the government disclose a wide range of information to the public for any reason. However, the information and data covered by FOIA is incomplete, which means that access to the full universe of government information remains limited.

Subsequently, the federal government has passed several additional transparency laws. These include the following:

• The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, which sought to “maximize the utility of information created, collected, maintained, used, shared, and disseminated by the Federal Government” by requiring that certain types of data be posted online,
• The Electronic Freedom of Information Act of 1996 (EFOIA), which attempted to modernize FOIA at a time when the Internet was just beginning to emerge as a popular communications tool, and
• The E-Government Act of 2002, which attempted to improve the quality of federal rule making decisions by, among other things legislating the use of e-rulemaking in order to make agency rulemaking proceedings more inclusive.

All of these examples suggest that government transparency polices have evolved over three generations. The first generation encompassed a variety of right-to-know policies, which were designed to prevent arbitrary government action. The second generation provided more targeted transparency policies, including the APA, FOIA, and EFOIA. These laws, which have been adapted by state and local entities, mandate baseline levels of information disclosure by the government. Targeted transparency policies are purely one-way. And most recently, the federal government has enforced a series of collaborative transparency policies that include the E-Government Act as well as initiatives recently launched by the Obama administration. These policies build on right-to-know and targeted transparency policies by leveraging computer technology and the Internet to serve as a medium via which government may interact with stakeholders. This approach is two way and user-centered, with government playing a facilitating role to communicate information in real-time and in scalable formats (Fung et al, 2007, p. 25).

The Impact of New Technologies on Traditional Notions of Government Transparency

Using a variety of Web 2.0 and 3.0 tools, from social media to collaboration, government organizations are becoming more transparent and engaging the public in decision-making processes. On one level, transparency is being enhanced as governments utilize the web to integrate services across various agencies and departments, jurisdictions and levels of government. At another level, government entities are increasingly using readily available online tools, such as IdeaScale (http://www.ideascale.com/opengov/) to solicit public feedback and promote deliberation among citizens on discrete topics. This new multi-level form of transparency is often referred to as open government, a label that not only suggests transparency but also active collaboration with citizens in the policymaking process.

Lathrop and Ruma (2010) describe open government as:

…government that co-innovates with everyone, especially citizens, shares resources that were previously closely guarded; harness[es] the power of mass collaboration, drives transparency throughout its operations, and behaves not as isolated department of jurisdiction, but as something new, a truly integrated and networked organization.

Here, the process of governing leverages new technologies to bring government practices out into the sunlight for closer public scrutiny. Unlike the pre-Internet days of transparency regulation, citizens can now easily act on the information they receive by actively contributing to a deliberative process by submitting comments to proposed rules or draft policy text.

This new approach rests on the premise that more information in the hands of the public will make government leaders more responsible and accountable. Participation also allows the public to contribute more of their ideas and expertise to public policies that in turn benefit their communities. This type of collaboration improves the effectiveness of government by encouraging partnerships and cooperation within the federal government, across levels of government, and between the government and private institutions. The Participatory Politics Foundation’s OpenCongress Blog (http://www.opencongress.org) is an emerging example of this type of activity. The Participatory Politics Foundation’s OpenCongress Blog (federal) and OpenGovernment website (state/local) are emerging examples of this type of activity. These sites track bills, votes, and elected representatives, and allow citizens to learn, share and comment on the activities and decisions of their elected officials. Other examples of websites that promote this type of transparency are included in the Appendix.

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