The Knight Commission Recommendation

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

by Jon Gant and Nicol Turner-Lee

“Require government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records, and make civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the productive public use of such data.”

— Recommendation 4, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age
The Knight Commission Recommendation

A core pillar of democratic society is the interaction between government and the governed. An informed and engaged citizenry facilitates effective governance at every level by providing a valuable counterbalance against the esoteric and oftentimes secretive machinations of government bureaucracy. Governments that are transparent, open and solicitous of public input tend to operate more efficiently and produce laws and policies that more accurately reflect real world conditions. Ultimately, all citizens want the opportunity to communicate with government to ensure that their interests are represented and that their elected officials are contributing to the public interest. Thus, the open and free flow of information regarding government activity is essential for communities to remain vibrant and democratic. Such an assertion was outlined in the Knight Commission report on the future of the nation’s information democracy and embedded in the above recommendation.

Over the last several decades, local, state and federal government entities in theUnited States have steadily moved toward more openness and transparency. By definition, openness and transparency allow stakeholders to gather information that may be critical to their interests and offer channels of communication between stakeholders and elected officials. Aided by legislative mandates and public policy decisions, most government entities are now required to make a minimum amount of information available to citizens, operate in the “sunlight” and not behind closed doors and actively engage citizens in the policymaking process. As a result, government has become much more accountable to the people that it serves.

These trends have been fundamentally and positively enhanced by the emergence of an array of information and communication technologies (ICTs)— including broadband Internet access, smartphones, netbooks and other devices capable of accessing data via the web—that make it much easier for citizens to access and consume government information. In addition, these tools are facilitating a revolution in how citizens interact with government generally and with data specifically. The terms digital government, electronic government (e-government), and electronic governance (e-governance) are widely used to refer to the use of ICT in public-sector organizations.

As a growing number of entities and agencies at every level of government leverage the power and relative ubiquity of the Internet to engage citizens in a variety of functions, from informal rulemaking proceedings to formal legislative initiatives, a number of innovative government entities are also tapping into the expertise and innovative spirit of the public by encouraging citizens to create new tools—many of which are enabled by broadband—that transform government data and information into practical tools for use by the general public.

Despite these many promising trends, the majority of government entities at the local, state and federal levels are still operating in a one-way world in which government simply pushes data to the public. According to a 2008 study by Darrell West of over 1,500 state and federal government websites, while 88 percent of government websites provided email addresses for visitors to contact a person in the particular department other than the webmaster, just under half included other methods (comment sections, message boards, surveys or chat rooms) to facilitate more democratic conversations with the public (West, 2008). This myopic view of transparency and simplistic implementation of e-government processes severely limits the potential for more robust citizen engagement in a myriad of government processes.

This paper examines how and why government at every level, but particularly at the local level, should embrace emerging ICT and Web 2.0 and 3.0 tools (e.g., social media and collaboration) to enhance their openness and engage citizens more fully. This paper offers several implementation strategies for Recommendation 4 that focus on enhancing government expertise and transparency, educating citizens regarding the availability and utility of government information and e-government tools, expanding efforts to support greater adoption of broadband Internet access services and devices, and forging public-private-citizen partnerships in order to enhance open government solutions. The purpose of these strategies is to provide a framework for facilitating these activities and placing government entities on the proper pathway toward the full realization of the benefits of information transparency.

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