People all around the world are demanding more openness in government. They are seeking ways for citizens to be able to participate in the decisions that effect them, and for governments to be more transparent, responsive, accountable, and effective. The Open Government Guide highlights practical, measurable, specific and actionable steps that governments can, and are taking across a range of cross-cutting and focused areas. Continue reading
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Platforms, Apps, Solutions
Around the world, parliaments, governments, civil society organizations, and even individual parliamentarians, are taking measures to make the legislative process more participatory. Andrew Mandelbaum published a list, in OpeningParliament.org, containing examples of some of the more prominent efforts to engage citizens in the legislative process. Continue reading
Stanford’ s Social Algorithm’ s Lab (SOAL) has built an interactive Participatory Budgeting Platform that allows users to simulate budgetary decision making on $1 million dollars of public monies. The Lab brings together economics, computer science, and networking to work on problems and understand the impact of social networking. Continue reading
The Design Action Research with Government (DARG) guidebook describes how government, community organizations and academic researchers can collaborate on developing new tools, processes and knowledge for innovating civic life in cities. Continue reading
Code for America team issued its 2013 annual report, highlighting their members civic tech work in cities across the U.S.A. The report summarizes, beautifully, important work aiming to create digital interfaces to government. Continue reading
Open Data Day, on Saturday, February 22rd, 2014, is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments. Continue reading
A new report by Professor Brabham, for IBM Center for The Business of Government, tries to categorize some of the new government crowdsourcing cases into a four-part, problem-based typology, encouraging government leaders and public administrators to consider these open problem-solving techniques as a way to engage the public and tackle difficult policy and administrative tasks more effectively and efficiently using online communities. Continue reading