The release of the Open Government Directive on December 8, 2009 has prompted many Agencies to wrestle with what a comprehensive Open Government Plan for their Agency would look like. According to the Directive, Open Government Plans are due for each Agency in 120 days. (The Sunlight foundation provides a good high level summary of other requirements here.) The Directive then lays out about 22 detailed requirements for that plan, but gives little guidance to Agencies about how they should meet those requirements. Like a typical and appropriate policy, the Directive details the “what” but not the “how”. Thus, Agencies need to plan how they’ll be more transparent, participatory and collaborative in key areas, but they are on their own in figuring out how to do that. The Department of Transportation, recognizing that this requirement would inevitably be coming, started thinking about the “how” months ago. Through this preparation work, they developed, in partnership with Phase One Consulting Group, an Open Government methodology that captures all the key areas that Agencies should be concerned with when doing comprehensive open government planning. This methodology was introduced in a blog posting last month and at the first Open Government Directive Workshop series.
This blog series will devote individual blog postings to each of the “pie pieces” or key areas of Open Government planning. In each of the blog postings we will describe what each of the pie pieces mean, why they are critical to include in Open Government planning, and how they are tied to the requirements of the Open Government Directive.
- Legal (to be posted 12/16/2009)
- Strategic Planning (to be posted 12/18/2009)
- Internal Directives (to be posted 12/21/2009)
- Performance (to be posted 12/23/2009)
- Security (to be posted 12/28/2009)
- Infrastructure (to be posted 12/30/2009)
- Tools (to be posted 1/4/2010)
- Pilots/ Existing Programs (to be posted 1/6/2010)
- Participatory Activities (to be posted 1/8/2010)
- Agency Stakeholders (to be posted 1/11/2010)
- Communication Channels (to be posted 1/13/2010)
- Employee Readiness (to be posted 1/15/2010)
(Note: This is a part of a series that was originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)