by Molly O'Neill
CGI Initiative for Collaborative Government Fellow
Vice President, CGI

Earlier this month, federal agencies published their Open Government Plans as required under the president’s December 8 Open Government Directive. The plans identify how each agency would become more transparent, improve data quality and engage citizens. 

A few years ago, while chief information officer at the Environmental Protection Agency, I launched the National Dialogue for Improving Access to Information.  The purpose of the dialogue was to engage stakeholders and the public in a strategic planning process. But, as I learned this month, it really wasn’t an example of engagement in the process, but rather of soliciting ideas to inform the process – still a great first step.  

Since leaving EPA, I’ve continued to follow agencies’ citizen engagement activities to see how they are evolving.  One of the most interesting, complex and risky was the recent National Dialogue on the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) partnered with the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) to conduct this dialogue, which was rooted in stakeholder groups but open to the public. DHS and NAPA drew upon the viral nature of social media to spawn other conversations.

This public dialogue was unique. Most citizen engagement activities to date have involved soliciting ideas. This one was about engaging in a federal process.   It was done in three phases:

     1.    Get initial input/steering 
     2.    Solicit comments on the draft priorities based on this input
     3.    Seek comments on the final product.

The participants could actually see how the comments they were providing were incorporated (or not) into drafts and then a final plan.  Yes, they got to review the drafts along the way! This dialogue provided engagement on an iterative process – definitely an evolution from past dialogues.

By Andrew McLauchlin, Director, CGI Initiative for Collaborative Government

April 8, 2010 

It’s a tough question, one that looms larger and larger as spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act begins to tail off. One approach that federal, state and local leaders can find ample evidence to support is to invest in broadband connectivity in the communities that most need them. In her paper, “Sustaining Jobs After the Stimulus: Building on Broadband,” just published by the CGI Initiative for Collaborative Government in partnership with George Mason University, Dr. Darrene Hackler details the potential for broadband investment not just to create jobs now but also to serve as a sustaining artery for jobs in the long term.

Broadband’s potential impact is demonstrated by efforts already underway, where its deployment has helped give birth to information technology centers of excellence in rural and disadvantaged regions. In her 2008 research report, “Creating Jobs in America: Case Studies in Local Economic Development,” published by the CGI Initiative, Dr. Hackler described two examples of this approach in Russell County, Va., and Northeast Pennsylvania, along with examples of job creation via industrial diversification elsewhere.

In another 2008 report published by the CGI Initiative, Dr. Lester Salamon, Director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University, recommended expanding on this model. He advocated “the creation of a National Technology Initiative to promote the development of skilled, technology-oriented jobs in disadvantaged American communities.” His recommendation was based on the need to build up U.S. information technology expertise as a matter of national security, as well as the imperative to create high-quality U.S. jobs.

To address this challenge, Dr. Salamon recommended the creation of “at least a dozen economically competitive centers of information technology in disadvantaged rural and urban areas of the United States over the next 10 years, with similar objectives possible in other technology areas.”

Just weeks after the release of these two 2008 reports, the American economy entered a serious decline. Subsequently, in February 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act became law. Among its many areas of targeted stimulus, the Recovery Act included billions of dollars to expand broadband connectivity across the United States and to train American workers for 21st-century jobs.

Molly O’Neill was practicing open government before open government was “cool,” as CIO at EPA from 2007 to 2009.

She ran her first major open government initiative in 2007, employing YouTube videos, Flickr for photographs, a wiki and data mashups with Google Earth to help the Puget Sound Partnership Leadership Council with a hurry-up effort to collect ideas and information for a strategic plan to help raise funds to clean and restore the Pacific Northwest waterway.

After reviewing early versions of some agencies’ open government plans due April 7, O’Neill says she is encouraged but can see the initiative still is in its infancy. To make real change occur via open government, she says, it must be folded into existing government processes.

While agency plans talk about the need for culture change to achieve open government, O’Neill cautions that although incorporating transparency, public engagement and collaboration requires new thinking and leadership, open government shouldn’t require a years-long cultural revolution.

Instead of creating lots of teams to figure out what to do, she says, agencies should adapt the existing processes they use to embrace open government. For example, she proposes that agencies change their enterprise architectures and/or system design and planning processes to include data sharing and publishing as an organic goal, so new systems produce sharable data as a matter of course.

In this video blog post, O’Neill elaborates on ways agencies can become early adopters, embedding open government in ongoing processes. She also emphasizes the need to move quickly from engaging the public in low-risk ways about noncontroversial subjects to integrating citizen engagement in agencies’ day-to-day work on issues that directly affect citizens’ lives.

Already, most agencies have put up their open government Web pages to solicit public input and made public their high-value data sets to meet the requirements of December’s Open Government Directive. Now, agency leaders are in the throes of finalizing the detailed open government plans due April 7. Here at the CGI Initiative for Collaborative Government, we’ve been working to on ideas to help not only meet the requirements of the Open Government Directive but to fulfill its promise.

Today, we present a product of those efforts, our Executive Guide to Public Engagement for Open Government. It draws on the experience of one of government's early advocates and practitioners in this area, Molly O'Neill, the former CIO at the EPA. Molly offers practical and actionable insights for agency executives seeking to make public involvement efforts effective, efficient and engaging so it can help shape policy, inform decision-making and help tackle mission challenges.

Public engagement also is at the core of OMB Director Jeffrey Zients' March 8 memo, "Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes to Promote Open Government."  This springs from the president’s September 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, and it highlights ways agencies can use prizes and challenges to promote open government and innovation to improve mission delivery.

The Executive Guide to Public Engagement for Open Government highlights several relevant examples of successful public engagement efforts that yielded positive results in shaping policy decisions and helping to solve pressing technology challenges. It is the first in a series of timely, practical tools we will produce with our new CGI Initiative Fellows, who, like Molly, have significant experience as federal leaders. We’re proud to bring it to you and hope it provides actionable insights you can use as you apply open government as a mission multiplier. We’re anxious to improve this line of products, so please share your questions and comments at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

All three webinars from our recent series, "Practical Gov 2.0: Data Transparency, Collaborative Leadership, and Information Exchange to Improve Mission Delivery," are now available on video in their entirety.  This webinar series, hosted in partnership with Government Executive, provided practical insights to help agency leaders tackle today’s most pressing challenges: open government, collaboration, and broad-scale information exchange.

For your viewing convenience, the full video replay of each webinar can now be found on the Executive Guide pages for each webinar.  Below you’ll find a brief description and a link for each webinar.   We hope that you will find these timely and relevant webinars useful as you work to provide top-notch services to the nation’s citizens

Also, immediately below, you can sign up to receive Collaborative Government Today, our free, daily e-newsletter.  Every day, the CGI Initiative curates the Web for you, capturing the best, most important and timely reports, presentations, videos, podcasts, webinars and news stories related to collaborative government in all its forms.

"Making Data Public, Meaningful and Effective"
Former EPA CIO Molly O’Neill began a fascinating dialogue with leaders in government at all levels about the intricacies of sharing data with trusted partners and with the public.

"Collaborative Leadership: The Recovery Act and Beyond"
Energy Department Deputy Chief Financial Officer Owen Barwell kicked off a detailed discussion about the new forms of collaboration and data-sharing Energy used to respond to Recovery Act challenges.

"Practical Transparency: Applying Exchange Networks for Mission Results"
Lisa Schlosser, Director of EPA’s Office of Information Collection, offered lessons learned and reflection about developing and using information exchange networks.  The engaging discussion derived insights from the EPA’s Environmental Exchange Network and FederalReporting.gov.

An Executive Guide to Practical Transparency: Applying Exchange Networks for Mission Results

The need to collect, exchange, and analyze large amounts of data — about health records, environmental measurements, and stimulus spending, for example — is transforming the way government works. And in the future, agencies will rely even more on information exchange as a means of accomplishing America’s business.  The Environmental Protection Agency is on the forefront of tackling this challenge through the EPA Exchange Network. The network is a partnership among states, tribes, and the EPA that is revolutionizing environmental information sharing. This approach provides real-time access to high-quality data while saving time, resources, and money for partner states, tribes, and territories.

At our December 10 webinar, "Practical Transparency: Applying Exchange Networks for Mission Results," Lisa Schlosser, Director of the EPA Office of Information Collection, kicked off an insightful discussion on the development and use of information exchange networks.  This engaging discussion provided lessons learned from the EPA’s Environmental Exchange Network and FederalReporting.gov. It also outlined how other agencies and states can improve mission delivery and better meet the mandates of the new Open Government Directive by leveraging EPA's model.

Our executive guide provides background and key takeaways from the discussion, as well as additional on-line information and resources. You’ll also find a link to the archived webinar so you can hear the entire discussion.

Please also put us to work for you collecting the latest news about collaborative government. Just sign up to receive the Collaborative Government Today e-newsletter from the CGI Initiative. Every day, we cull the best reports, newest developments, smartest commentary, breaking leadership announcements, webcasts and podcasts about data sharing, transparency and collaborative government. Get your copy here:

To view the December 10 webinar in archives, please click here.