Building a Scalable Open Government Process

Much of the energy and effort around open government to date has literally been hacked together or leans towards a reactive, transparency watchdog approach to making government more extroverted.

This is understandable. Any new growth area has its experimental phase and, in order to discover what works, you must try everything. After two years of open government (yes, others have been doing this much longer), we’re at a point where we’ve tried a number of tricks, and it’s time to assess what works and what doesn’t.

We’ve reached the point in the movement where hacking for hacking’s sake and professional finger-pointing has reached its capacity to affect sustainable change in government. Both of these aspects have their merits (the former much more so than the latter), but it’s time to think critically about what effort is being put forward, start assessing the return on investment and institute proactive processes for a scalable approach to open government.

It’s now time to be big picture proactive and results-oriented.