The Rise of Gov 2.0

At the close of President Obama’s first 200 days in office, the administration has demonstrated a willingness to experiment with new technologies and their potential role in making government more participatory and accountable. New e-government tools have been deployed to keep track of government spending, gather public input on policymaking, and convey the status of government projects. These tools may hold the potential to give Main Street the same voice in government traditionally reserved for K Street.

Participation

The largest e-government project launched thus far has been the effort to collect input on the pending Open Government Directive. On May 21, the administration began a three-phase process to generate ideas, discuss issues, and draft policy proposals related to the directive. The effort combined an online smorgasbord of wikis, electronic voting, and blogs with a traditional input process. Over 1,000 ideas were submitted to the first phase of the project. This effort wrapped up on July 6, just over one month after it was initially launched.

Two other web-based public discussions followed the path laid out by the Open Government Directive process. The new efforts addressed declassification and the executive branch's use of Internet cookies on its websites.

The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) began operation in 2006 to create more transparency and greater access to declassified documents. In July 2009, PIDB utilized a blog to solicit public input on potential revisions to Executive Order 12958 and received over 150 comments. This was followed quickly in early August by the Office of Management and Budget’s use of a blog to discuss its cookie policy for federal websites; the goal of the discussion was to determine how to protect privacy of site visitors while utilizing "user- friendly, dynamic, and citizen-centric websites."

These efforts have been met with some criticism and doubt [1]. The administration struggled to keep many of the discussions on track as some participants attempted to hijack the Open Government Directive dialogue, demanding the release of U.F.O. records, the president’s birth certificate, and the legalization of marijuana. As online experiments for engaging the public have progressed, the administration has employed different moderating tools to keep discussions focused on the policy debates at hand.

Some interested groups have begun a dialogue to assess the administration’s handling of these discussions and to identify ways in which the tools used can be improved. The League of Women Voters, AmericaSpeaks, OMB Watch, and several other groups put together a survey [2] for those who participated in the Open Government Directive process. These groups hope to present recommendations for improvement to the administration.

Additionally, while the government has attempted to engage the public online, none of the initiatives involved have been completed; thus, the weight and influence of the public’s voice in the policymaking process remains to be seen.

Accountability

The administration has also recognized the potential of e-government tools to improve accountability.

To this end, the administration has developed several new interactive websites, including an "IT Dashboard." The dashboard, launched in late June, is part of the redesigned USAspending.gov and tracks complicated and costly procurements of government IT services. The system allows users to examine every federal IT project by agency and shows whether each project is on schedule and on budget, along with a link to a detailed list of performance metrics for the project.

Furthermore, the dashboard demonstrated its usefulness in improving accountability within a month of being launched. In late July, officials with the Veterans Affairs Department (VA) were able to pinpoint more than 45 failing IT projects in the process of compiling data for the dashboard system. These programs were either significantly behind schedule or over budget. As a result, the VA promptly suspended the programs to assess them for possible cancellation, thereby saving taxpayers money.

Other new federal websites include Recovery.gov, which will soon be redesigned. Since the site's launch in April, the government has continued to add new features to Recovery.gov. Included in these updates is a recipient mapping feature that incorporates data from USAspending.gov to create visualizations of Recovery Act projects throughout the country. The mapping system addressed early criticism [3] that data from the two sites were not linked.

These initiatives hold promise for a new era of e-government that enables a more participatory and accountable federal system. However, they also demonstrate the relative inexperience the government has in deploying new technologies for these purposes. While tools exist to accomplish these goals, the administration is still in the beginning phases of shaping them in such a way that maximizes their utility.