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Samstag, 4.05.2024
eGovernment Forschung seit 2001 | eGovernment Research since 2001

Open Government

  • US: Open Data Success Requires Streamlining and Standardization

    On President Obama's first day in office, he signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government -- a movement that already has transformed the way government and citizens communicate with one another.

    Shared government data sets present unlimited opportunity, said Yo Yoshida, CEO of the mobile commerce company Appallicious. But to really break open the potential of open data, streamlining and standardizing the data is key.

  • US: Open Data, Transparency Sites That Helped Gov't Save Billions To Be Shut Down Over $30 Million?

    While we've faulted the Obama administration for its many, many failings on the promised transparency front, the one area where they actually had done some good was with their work on the IT side, where the CTO and CIO had created some pretty cool websites sharing important data with the public, and pushing federal agencies to be a lot more transparent about their federal IT spending. Just last week, they announced plans to open source the famed ITDashboard.gov software, noting that it "was a major component of the process the Federal Government employed to save over $3 billion in just its first two years of deployment."

    And now they're shutting it down.

  • US: Open Government Prospects in 2014

    As we look ahead through the new year, a number of major open government issues will almost certainly become the center of policy debates and offer opportunities for improving transparency. This article presents the top open government issues we believe are most likely to garner the most time and attention of Washington policymakers. And, since every year offers surprises, we also offer a quick list of the most likely "wild card" issues that may emerge in 2014.

    Freedom of Information Act

    Several ripe opportunities for improvements to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) are likely to present themselves in the coming year. The FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act, passed out of committee in March 2013, is pending consideration by the full House. Transparency advocates are hopeful that the Senate will introduce its own FOIA reform bill in 2014. But proposals in other bills could weaken citizen access to certain kinds of public information. For instance, the House-passed Farm Bill includes dangerous provisions that would restrict access to information about the environmental impacts of large "industrial" agricultural operations.

  • US: Open government requires usefulness not just data

    Open government initiatives need to frame the data they supply supply in ways the public can quickly understand and want to use, instead of simply supplying greater amounts of it, says the Center of Technology in Government.

    In a Dec. 4 whitepaper (.pdf) the research center from the State University of New York-Albany says there exists a growing interest at all levels of government to open up government data.

  • US: Open Government Sites Fall Prey To Budget Cuts

    The White House cancels plans to build new transparency sites and will be unable to update some established ones, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra said.

    As open-government advocates feared, budget cuts have impacted key Obama administration transparency websites, with officials having to cancel plans for new ones and forgo improvements to others.

    The White House has scrapped projects to build two new transparency sites--FedSpace, a knowledge-management site supporting government programs, and the Citizen Services Dashboard, a website providing relevant data on top federal citizen-facing services, according to a letter by federal CIO Vivek Kundra published online by Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del. "While we believe that we can make progress on several important initiatives, several projects will experience a sharp decline given the limited amount of funding," Kundra wrote. "No project will go unaffected."

  • US: Open Government: Building Trust and Civic Engagement

    Daily life has become inseparable from new technologies. Our phones and tablets let us shop from the couch, track how many miles we run, and keep in touch with friends across town and around the world - benefits barely possible a decade ago.

    With respect to our communities, Uber and Lyft now shuttle us around town, reducing street traffic and parking problems. Adopt-a-Hydrant apps coordinate efforts to dig out hydrants after snowstorms, saving firefighters time when battling blazes. Change.org, helps millions petition for and effect social and political change.

  • US: Open Government? Check. Public Participation? Not yet.

    By requiring all federal agencies to be more transparent, collaborative, and participatory, the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative promised to bring watershed changes to government. While much progress has been made since the release of its first National Action Plan, advances in the arena of public participation have been disappointing. Champions of public participation had high hopes for the second National Action Plan, which was released by the White House on December 5, 2013. While the second plan has numerous commendable and important commitments that increase transparency and collaboration, it falls flat with regard to public participation, perhaps with the exception of its promotion of participatory budgeting.

  • US: Open-Data-Experten kritisieren mögliches Ende von Data.gov

    Data.gov ist das Flaggschiff innerhalb der Transparenzinitiative, mit der US-Präsident Barack Obama (auch) seine Wahl gewonnen hat. Doch die neue Web-Infrastruktur, mit der den Bürgern deutlich mehr Informationen aus der Verwaltung zur Verfügung gestellt werden sollten, steht vor dem Aus. Von sowieso schon schmalen 35 Millionen Dollar, die dem sogenannten Electronic Government Fund zur Verfügung stehen sollten, könnte der Etat bald auf 8 Millionen Dollar schrumpfen. Grund sind die anstehenden großräumigen Einschnitte im amerikanischen Haushalt, um den Republikaner und Demokraten gerade kämpfen.

  • US: Open-government initiative marks two-year milestone

    Two years ago Friday, on his first day in office, President Obama issued a memo aimed at making government operations more transparent. While open government advocates have largely panned the effort over what they call toothless policies, a regulatory compliance initiative announced Tuesday is giving some of those critics new hope the administration's transparency objectives eventually might be realized.

    The new guidance, which is separate from an executive order on regulatory review released the same day, directs agencies to develop plans for making information about the enforcement of rules "accessible, downloadable and searchable online" within four months. White House officials then must pull those performance statistics into a central website that makes it easy for the public to compare agencies' records on compliance.

  • US: OpenGov Offers Head-to-Head Budget Comparisons for Government

    Civic tech startup OpenGov has released a tool to analyze budgets city to city, department by department, for financial strategy and policy making.

    The financial transparency startup OpenGov has a new tool in its chest of budget visualization apps.

    On Oct. 28, OpenGov Co-founders Mike Rosengarten, Nate Levine, Joe Lonsdale and CEO Zac Bookman, announced a new feature called OpenGov Comparisons. The analytics tool, available only for internal users, is marketed as a digital scale that instantly weighs one city’s expenditures and revenues against another's. Financial planners might use the analysis to identify budget benchmarks for expenditures in public safety, transportation, public works and other services.

  • US: Philadelphia Must Catch Up on Open Government, Councilman Says

    Philadelphia Councilman Bill Green wants the City of Brotherly Love to take a liking to open government.

    This spring, Green introduced an open government plan, emphasizing that the city needs to utilize technology in order to go paperless. Green said the city lags behind the rest of the country on open government initiatives, but his new plan will help the city push ahead.

    “The great thing about where we are Philadelphia is that we’re 30 years behind everybody else,” Green said. “So we can leapfrog every other jurisdiction in the county and be the nation’s leader in open government and efficiency enhancements that will result from this technology.”

  • US: Pinterest for Government: A Recipe for Success?

    Recent news reports confirm what social media devotees have known for a while: The bulletin-board style image sharing website Pinterest is gaining ground as an online platform. With its current rank as the third most popular social networking site, behind only Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest can no longer be sidelined as simply a forum for exchanging recipes and decorating ideas.

    Indeed, Pinterest’s mission statement reveals a much grander vision for the site, to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting." But the rapid rise of Pinterest raises an interesting question for public agencies: Should governments use this tool to engage their citizens?

  • US: Public Websites Earn Perfect Scores for Transparency

    Since it first began evaluating the websites of government organizations in 2010, the Sunshine Review has seen an evolution in the kinds of data public agencies publish online. Kristin McMurray, managing editor for the nonprofit group devoted to encouraging transparent government operations, says budget information is becoming easier to find.

    “We’ve seen a definite increase in disclosing financial data,” McMurray said in a recent interview with Government Technology. “It’s definitely a growing trend to be transparent.” In addition, governments are more commonly providing information on lobbying activities and contract awards.

  • US: Seizing the real open-gov opportunity

    Open-government efforts — whether open data or open source — are often a compelling avenue for agencies because of their cost-effectiveness and potential to produce higher-quality output compared to their closed counterparts. Today, however, agencies are realizing with increasing frequency that open government provides another, unparalleled advantage: collaboration.

    Whereas past collaborative efforts in government were often costly and time-consuming, today, for the first time, technology is pushing us to the tipping point where it is becoming easier to work together than alone. This is true not only within an organization, but also across agencies and with the public.

  • US: Senator Carper calls on OMB to detail impact of e-government cuts

    Following up on concerns about decreased funding for the General Services Administration’s e-government fund, Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., has asked the federal chief information officer to detail how this will impact transparency efforts.

    In an April 21 letter to Vivek Kundra, Carper expressed his concern for the future of public websites like the ITDashboard, USASpending.gov and data.gov that rely on e-government funds to operate. Lawmakers slashed e-government funding from $34 million to $8 million in the 2011 spending bill.

  • US: Senator Carper Wants Information on Which Open-gov Sites Could be Shuttered

    In a letter to White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), who chairs a Senate subcommittee tasked with federal financial management and government information, asked for details about what potential cuts to the E-Government fund would mean for the administration’s open-gov goals.

    Carper said he wrote “out of concern for the future viability of the transparency and information technology management initiatives” that receive funding through the E-Gov fund.

    In his original budget request, President Barack Obama had requested $34 million for the fund, which pays to runs such sites as Data.gov and the IT Dashboard, but in the continuing resolution compromise that averted a government shutdown two weeks ago, the fund received only $8 million.

  • US: Small Wins for Transparency in 2012 Spending Package

    The fiscal year 2012 spending package signed by President Obama on Dec. 23 included some good news for government transparency and right to know. Many of the worst provisions of the bill were removed from the final compromise, but open government advocates remain concerned.

    The Budget Control Act, passed to end the debt ceiling hostage crisis in August, capped total funding for fiscal year (FY) 2012, but Congress continued to struggle over specific allocations for programs and the slew of conservative policy riders attached by the House, which made compromise with the Senate difficult. To avoid a government shutdown or another stopgap spending bill, Congress had to rush to finalize the funding bill (H.R. 2055) before the holidays in a cramped and opaque process.

  • US: State Spending Transparency Improving, Report Finds

    States showed significant improvement last year in how well they provided online access to government spending data, according to a state transparency report by U.S. PIRG, a nonprofit, nonpartisan federation of Public Interest Research Groups.

    Twenty-one states earned “A” or “B” grades for their efforts in 2011, 12 more states than in 2010. In addition, only five states received failing marks — a 50 percent reduction from last year. The third annual study, Following the Money 2012, rates online state spending transparency systems on a scorecard.

  • US: Tech Firms Push For Government Data Transparency

    A growing number of technology companies and non-profit organizations have joined forced to press the U.S. government to establish a standard system by which federal data is published online.

    The non-partisan alliance, dubbed the Data Transparency Coalition (DTC), was launched on Monday, and includes companies such as Microsoft, Teradata and several other data analysis and management firms.

    The group said the federal government publishes its online data in too many formats, and requires contractors and grant recipients to submit information in multiple formats.

  • US: Tennessee: Open Chattanooga Hopes to Use Data to Solve Tough City Problems

    Open Chattanooga recently got a grant to work with city government to use open data to take on city issues like insufficient affordable housing.

    When Tim Moreland talks about his work to use government data to solve community dilemmas like insufficient affordable housing, he watches as people's eyes glaze over.

    So, Moreland tries to suppress the nerd inside and speak in plain language.

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