Open Government is Not Dead: The Conversation is Just Maturing…

This installment was inspired by the recent Open Government Community Summit held at NASA on October 13, 2010 and many recent blog postings discussing variations on the death, sophomore slump and/or decline of Gov 2.0 and Open Gov (including “Sophomore slump for Open Government?”, comment thread of “What Gov 2.0 Needs Now”, “Will Gov 2.0 and Open Gov Die?”). Over the last year my colleagues and I at POCG have been striving to contextualize the Open Government Initiative within a broader innovation vision. This presentation from the Summit introduced some of our thinking to the attendees. This blog posting shares the same thinking. Bottom line: Open Government is not dead. However, Open Government initiatives are only part of what is required to cultivate an innovative agency culture. They are an important part of a much larger innovation ecosystem, but only one part nonetheless. To cultivate a culture of innovation, the broader picture of what “innovation” means to the Federal Government is critical to understand.

True innovation powered by good ideas is a tricky thing. Before you continue reading, I highly recommend you take five minutes to watch this great video “Where good ideas come from” for a walk through one depiction of the evolution of great ideas over history. What Gov 2.0 champions, Open Government Senior Accountable Officials, and the feds and consultants that support them have been trying to do over the last year, under the direction of the Open Government Directive, is complicated and incredibly difficult. Over the last couple years agencies have been experimenting with apps contests, data release and visualization, social media, and other Open Gov related efforts. These are huge efforts within themselves given the technology, policy and cultural barriers to implementation that exist. But to create the lasting change that will truly revolutionize government performance, many of those individuals have realized that establishing a culture of innovation that has permanence, is institutionalized, and directly improves mission delivery is paramount. It’s creating that culture of innovation that seems impossible but is one of the most important outcomes of all this recent Open Gov and Gov 2.0 activity. The jury remains out on how the variety of initiatives we’ve already undertaken will support a culture of innovation.

As Dan Morgan (@dsmorgan77), an Open Gov Associate at POCG, would say “Government can create new spaces where ideas can collide, ecosystems can form, and innovation can be nurtured. It can do this in benevolent fashion, such as with prizes and competitions. It can do this with open data either actively (Community Health Data Initiative) or passively (simply releasing data on data.gov). It can use these tools internally (DOT’s IdeaHub, etc.) as well as externally (Unemployment Insurance reforms) to improve data quality, drive better data-driven decision making in formulating policy, achieve program performance targets, and ultimately deliver improved outcomes.” But this requires a fundamentally new way of thinking about how the government does business, across the board. It requires a culture of innovation throughout the business—not just in Open Government offices.

Does this vision seem a bit broader than the mandates in the Open Government Directive? It is. This vision is discussed in the President’s Strategy for American Innovation. If you haven’t read that document in full yet, I highly recommend you do. Figure 1 below displays some of the tactics that are mentioned in this Strategy to drive innovation. Within the context of the Strategy, Open Government is a critical enabler in accomplishing all of the key outcomes. Within this context, an Open Government can transform, accelerate, and increase the value of the outcomes of innovations. Open Government is only one enabler for innovation.

Figure 1: Sample Tactics for Promoting American Innovation

So what does this mean to the heroes out there that are struggling to advance the principles of Open Government every day? It means they are not alone. It means there are other tactics that are likely being employed at their agencies that share a common vision for innovation. It means that there is a larger context within which Open Government principles lie. Obviously, some of the puzzle pieces shown in Figure 1 overlap in theory and in practice. Table 1 below highlights some examples where Agencies are taking significant steps towards creating an innovative culture leveraging some of these tactics. Many of these efforts might be unknown in the current Open Gov context because of how we’ve framed the discussion around Open Government and Innovation.

 

Table 1: Examples of Agency Innovation Efforts (full disclosure: DOT is a client)

So for all you Open Gov practitioners, advocates, and heroes out there, what does this re-framing mean to you? It should help you further your objectives with new tools in your tool belt.

• Identify other innovation leaders in you agency. Bring those innovation leaders to cross-agency events and get them familiar with the Open Government Initiative. Become familiar with their programs and goals. You can be each other’s greatest allies.
• If your managers are resistant to Open Gov, try broadening the conversation to one of Innovation. It’s hard to argue with pursuing innovation to improve mission performance.
• Leverage Open Gov initiatives and pilots as success stories for innovation.

I’ve blogged before on many of the other puzzle pieces (including prizes and competitons,partnerships for sustainability, partnerships to create secondary markets to fill funding gaps, andpartnerships to develop infrastructure) and will make an effort to focus on some of the others in future blog postings. What are some other great examples of Agency innovation that are benefiting from the principles of transparency, participation and collaboration that you know of? What do you think about elevating the conversation from one of furthering “open government” to furthering “innovation”? What are the unintended consequences of such a scoping?

As always, please feel free to reach out to me on twitter at @jenngustetic at any time during this series to continue to conversation.

Jenn

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog for a special featured Govloop series when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

When NOT to Take the Lead: Partnering with Academia to Solve Our Nation’s Problems

This past week, I was up in Boston recruiting at MIT and Harvard and meeting with some of the Cambridge brain trust that are thinking about how to leverage technology, policy, and new incentive schemes to spur entrepreneurial markets and transform the government. During one of these fascinating coffee sessions with Georgina Campbell, a current student in my former graduate program (the Technology Policy Program at MIT), I learned about a phenomenal example of partnerships furthering innovation and entrepreneurship—the MIT clean energy prize. Georgina is one of this year’s managing directors. The MIT Clean Energy Prize (CEP) is a venture creation and innovation competition that was established in 2008 to encourage innovation in the energy space, specifically with regard to clean energy (see this executive summary for more detail on the prize). Since 2008, over 200 student teams from more than 60 U.S. universities have entered the competition. By the end of the 2010 competition, more than $800,000 in cash prizes will have been awarded. Furthermore, the CEP has only been around for 3 years yet the past teams have managed to raise over $65 million to support their clean energy technologies, including $13 million from the government-sponsored Advanced Research Project Funding for Energy (ARPA-E) program. The Department of Energy (DoE) is a key partner in this competition, providing much of the cash prize the last three years. There are several interesting things about this prize in particular:

• The DoE is a crucial partner, but not the lead on furthering this problem solving effort. As I’ve outlined before, prizes and competitions provide one way to stimulate innovation and tap “solver communities” that may not have been leveraged previously when considering some of our nation’s grand challenges (see my blog posting from the White House/ Case Foundation event on prizes and competitions in April where I discuss this assertion in more detail). Much of the recent discussion on prizes and competitions, even at the Gov 2.0 summit, has focused on prizes that are spearheaded by the Federal government. What the clean energy prize demonstrates is that the government is in many cases an essential partner in tapping solver communities, but that driving prizes and competitions does not need to always be the government’s primary responsibility. In this case, MIT is taking the lead, partnering with the government, giving graduate students an opportunity to learn the skills required to support this type of innovation, and producing technology innovations that are market-ready. The government does not always need to take the lead for prizes and competitions to be highly effective—as most commonly recognized through the X Prize Foundation’s work.
• Teams must be at least 50% made up of students and thus the “solver” base is motivated to participate by a variety of different things. Many mechanisms motivate teams to participate, including: the prize purse; superlative feedback on their entries from world class judging panels; a team-specific mentoring experience from dedicated and experienced industry, business and legal experts (in the semi-final rounds); feedback on business cases and entrepreneurial approaches to commercializing new technologies; and the opportunity to become part of a network of clean energy professionals and connect with potential clients and partners. Just by participating, students are engaged outside the classroom setting, given an opportunity to extend classroom theory to practice, and directly involved in strengthening Academic-Federal-Private relationships. This reinforces the importance of identifying solver communities in the initial prize design and determining incentives schemes based largely on the targeted solvers. Prizes are not simply “if you build it they will come”; they must be tailored individually to maximize impact.
• The clean energy mission of this prize furthers one of the highest priorities of the administration, but is likely to not be as well known throughout Washington DC as many of the apps contests and video challenges. To me, this is where the power of challenge.gov as a marketing platform becomes incredibly important to publicize prizes that target solver communities to engage in some of the grand challenges of our time—regardless of whether or not they are led by the federal government. However, this is only one communication channel and many will need to be leveraged to reach the full scope of solvers, influencers, mentors and partners in this issue area. Much more than a storefront will be needed to fully leverage the potential of prizes and competitions.

These interesting tidbits point to the notion that government agencies may need to consider a more organized way to receive competition/challenge participation requests from the public, industry and academia. The number of challenges most Agencies can support is limited, in some part due to internal inertia and support for prizes as a viable model for problem solving. Should the White House and OMB consider a simple policy or memorandum that clarifies how agencies can participate in external challenges much like the MIT challenge mentioned above? That way if an Agency can’t figure out how to support challenges where it takes the leading role, then at least it can judge or somehow participate in some external challenge of some sort. The point is that there are many possible structures and models for meaningful prizes and competitions—which is why intelligent prize design up front is so important.

Any other unique things you notice about this prize? What about other notable prizes that you don’t think are getting enough publicity in DC? Expect future jennovation postings that will be co-authored by Georgina as I monitor and share the MIT team’s progress on this year’s clean energy prize. As always, please feel free to reach out to me on twitter at @jenngustetic at any time during this series to continue to conversation.

Jenn

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog for a special featured Govloop series when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Suburban Sprawl and Sustainable Communities: Enhancing Mission and Public Value through Open Government and Partnerships

For the last year, I’ve been blogging about the three pillars of the Open Government Initiative—transparency, participation and collaboration. Each pillar points at the same theme: the Government cannot provide the best value with taxpayer dollars on its own. External partners are crucial to ensure value is maximized. Furthermore, Open Government in itself is not the mission of any Federal, state or local government; however its principles do help agencies achieve their particular missions more effectively. In practice, aligning these principles with existing programs and practices can be incredibly complex. In this week’s blog posting, I will describe one complex mission area and how Open Government principles may advance its provision. Complex Mission Provision: Encouraging Livable and Sustainable Communities  This year, leveraging Open Government principles, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) openly collected public feedback on their draft strategic plans (HUD used uservoice whereas DOT used ideascale). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also collected public feedback on their draft strategic plan during June and July of this year. HUD, DOT and EPA share one common strategic goal: to encourage livable and sustainable communities.

Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck distill the issues surrounding sustainable communities phenomenally in their book “Suburban Sprawl: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream”. In this book they describe how throughout the last century many government policies and professional standards have contributed to sprawling communities in America with underperforming schools, pollution, traffic and congestion, crime and unaffordable housing. But what defines “suburban sprawl” and how does this urban development model create communities that differ from traditional communities?Table 1, below, describes the differences between traditional communities and those developed as a result of suburban sprawl.

Table 1: Dominant Characteristics of the Two Models of Urban Growth

The clumping of land-use types in sprawling communities is partially a result of Federal policies after the Second World War, including the terms of FHA and VA loans that encouraged the construction of new homes and not the renovation of existing homes, the interstate highway program, and the neglect of mass transit [1]. On top of these Federal programs and policies, the planning profession worsened the physical separation of the aspects of daily life through zoning laws which require housing types, commercial and civic buildings to be separated.

But why should these differences matter to each of us and why is “livability” an important strategic goal for HUD, EPA and DOT?

• Our streets are less safe both for pedestrians and drivers, and we spend way more time commuting, extending our work-day [2]
• Homes are less affordable, and cars take away resources for buying a home for many people [3]
• Federal, state and municipal funds can’t keep pace with new growth at acceptable levels of taxation [4]
• If you’re one of the 80 Million Americans unable to drive, you have serious accessibility issues [5]

How to Improve through Openness and Partnerships

Given the coordination challenges across the Federal, state and municipal governments regarding livability issues, the need to engage experts in problem solving, and the responsibility of each citizen to advocate for their community, the livability mission area is ripe for more effective use of Open Government principles. In particular there are several ways that each level of government could “open up” and better coordinate community planning.

Municipal level: Local planning should be done with public participation [6]. This can include developing community master plans, monitoring compliance with guidelines, advisory committees and ongoing feedback and ideation.

Regional level: The US largely lacks regional government. Coordination between municipalities for regional planning is largely based on loose partnerships. This is not necessarily a problem if effective public-private partnerships amongst municipal and state governments and appropriate private partners can be formed and sustained to address regional issues. Regional planning and partnerships should be incentivized.

State level: At this level, interrelated issues begin to become siloed. In the words of Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck , “[if state DOT’s] wish to play a role in the creation of healthy communities, [they] must come to view transportation policy as an integral component of a regional land use plan, not just as an autonomous problem with a financial solution”. [7] Transparency with spending data, participation in the planning process, and collaboration between state agencies with different missions are crucial to expose areas for improvement.

Federal level: There are many complex issues at this level, including:

• Determining how Federal funds trickle down through grant programs to fund state and municipal government’s development funds. Without coordination and engagement with other Agencies, the public, and experts on policy choices about what to do with Federal funds, these grant programs can work against each other rather than complimenting one other.
• Determining how to address the decline of the Highway Trust Fund and the lack of money to adequately fund sustainable transportation. The Federal government should be prioritizing developing innovative approaches to transportation financing (in addition to FHWA and FTA’s efforts), including how to best leverage private capital and expertise through non-traditional means. This could be an area ripe for prizes and competitions.
• Leveraging household, workforce, transportation, and labor data to inform decisions about place-based policy making (CTPP has a lot of great information here).

In general, government policies often exist to correct some sort of perceived market failure or need. Open Government can help by providing the government with more complete information on what market failures exist and what needs the proposed policies may fill (or hinder). Livability is an example where embracing Open Government principles at ALL levels of Government could help improve policy choices and each American citizen’s quality of life.

Are you aware of any examples of where transparency, participation and collaboration at the municipal, regional, state or Federal level is happening currently to address livability? What’s working? What’s not working?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and as always, please feel free to reach out to me  at any time during this series to continue to conversation. Also, if you’re interested in more discussion about this subject, I encourage you to register for the GOVgreen Conference & Expo (http://www.govgreen.org/ ), Nov. 9-10 at the Washington, DC Convention Center.

Jenn

[1] Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck. Suburban Sprawl: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. North Point Press. New York, NY. © 2000. P 7-8. [2] Duany. P 119-125. [3] Duany, P 56. [4] Duany, P 7, 127-29. [5] Duany, P 115. [6] Duany, P 226. [7] Duany. P 231.

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog for a special featured Govloop series when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Congress Simplifying a Process? Making Prizes more attractive to the Federal Government…

Prizes and competitions provide one way to stimulate innovation and tap “solver communities” that may not have been leveraged previously when considering some of our nation’s grand challenges (see my blog posting from the White House/ Case Foundation event on prizes and competitions in April where I discuss this assertion in more detail). Building on their work to drive the use of prizes and competitions in government, the White House Office and Science Technology Policy’s (OSTP) Tom Kalil and Robynn Sturm recently described a significant step towards enabling innovation through these methods on the OSTP blog. In this posting, they describe how during the week of July 19, “the Senate Commerce Committee approved the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 with a provision that could further empower public sector use of prizes and challenges to spur innovation. The Prize Competitions section of the Committee bill would provide Federal Agencies across the Executive Branch with explicit authority to conduct prize competitions. The prize authority provision draws heavily from S. 3530, the Reward Innovation in America Act of 2010, introduced by Senators Pryor and Warner in June.” The impact of this legislation would be huge for conducting prizes and competitions government-wide. As I blogged last month, both on my featured jennovation series on Govloop and the Phase One Consulting Group Transformation in the Federal Sector Blog, there are several hurdles to federal Agencies conducting prizes and competitions, including explicit authorization by Congress to do so. The Pryor/Warner language would advance Agencies’ ability to use these innovative problem solving methods by granting and/or expanding several key exemptions and authorities, including:

• General prize authority to EACH Agency head: Sec 24(b) states that “each head of an agency may carry out a program to award prizes competitively to stimulate innovation that has the potential to advance the mission of the respective agency.” Right now, some Agencies have the authority to conduct prizes and competitions. However many others do not. Having the explicit authority to award prizes is a crucial first step in paving the way for Agencies to consider these methods as viable options for problem solving and stimulating innovation.
• Exemption from the Federal Advisory Committee Act for Judging: Sec 24(k)(4) states that “the Federal Advisory Committee Act (5 U.S.C. App.) shall not apply to any committee, board, commission, panel, task force, or similar entity, created solely for the purpose of judging prize competitions under this section.” FACA applies when an advisory committee is established or utilized by one or more Agencies, in the interest of obtaining advice or recommendations for the President or one or more Agencies or officers of the Federal government. This law requires advisory committees to follow a rigorous process for selection and meetings. Exempting judging panels will significantly relieve many of the procedural burdens currently associated with selecting prize winners through panels of expert judges.
• Gift authority for prizes and competitions: Sec 24(m)(1) states that “support for a prize competition under this section, including financial support for the design and administration of a prize or funds for a monetary prize purse, may consist of Federal appropriated funds and funds provided by the private sector for such cash prizes. The head of an agency may accept funds from other Federal agencies to support such competitions.” Currently, if a non-governmental organization is paying for anything at all (financial or in-kind) agencies have to pay close attention to their gift authority. In most cases, a legal consultation and partnership agreement is required that details the Agency’s authorities for accepting gifts. In other cases, the federal government is prohibited from receiving gifts. This expanded gift authority, for the use of prizes and competitions, will significantly assist agencies in identifying the funds to support the prize “purse” and well as operational expenses, making prizes a more viable option still.

In the coming months I’ll be keeping a close eye on the progress of this legislation through the Senate. It’s hard enough to design and operate an effective prize and competition, but without a permitting legal framework the upfront procedural work can be so burdensome that they are never explored as viable options. This upfront procedural burden is one of the largest roadblocks for prizes and competitions. Thus, this legislation is a crucial piece of the puzzle to drive forward the President’s Innovation Agenda and the principles of Open Government.

Are there any other barriers to the use of prizes and competitions that you’ve seen torn down recently? Perhaps the promise of the www.challenge.gov portal to market and support the operation of prizes once they are identified?

As always, please feel free to reach out to me at any time during this series to continue to conversation.

Jenn

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog for a special featured Govloop series when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Mind the Gap: How Innovative Partnerships Can Help Fill the Funding Gap

In my introductory posting in the “jennovation” series for Govloop and Phase One Consulting Group’s Transformation in the Federal Sector Blog, I introduced you to an innovative platform known as the Department of Education’s Innovation Portal. This week I want to describe a little more about how that portal, in combination withdata.ed.gov and the i3 Foundation Registry, demonstrates how government 2.0 technologies can help to create secondary markets to fill funding gaps. This is making a bit of a jump from my last posting, where I focused on Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure development. However, both examples, whether it be building a road through a PPP or funding innovative education solutions, demonstrate how in many instances private capital must supplement federal funding to solve the grand challenges of our time.

The Department of Education was appropriated $650M through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) for the Investing in Innovation (i3) grant program to “provide competitive grants that expand the implementation of, and investment in, innovative and evidence-based practices, programs and strategies that significantly:

• improve K-12 achievement and close achievement gaps;
• decrease dropout rates;
• increase high school graduation rates; and
• improve teacher and school leader effectiveness.

[The funds are intended] to accelerate the creation of an education sector that supports the rapid development and adoption of effective solutions.” [1]

Instead of disbursing the funds through an entirely traditional grant program, the Department of Education has leveraged the principles of Open Government in several innovative ways to pilot “open grant making”. Their approach has opened up the entire process of grant making to make federal funding demand more visible, to encourage a more transparent award process, and to create a secondary market for unfunded applications. They are piloting how to do this through several innovative websites that provide different functions:

• Data Visualization: The data.ed.gov portal visualizes important information about the grant applications (no awards have been made yet): location of applications, amount requested, summaries of the projects, and the ability to filter by priority area and project type (development, validation and scale-up). This is a relatively novel way of displaying pre-award grant information. Currently USASpending and theFederal Assistance Award Data System display award information but not pre-award information. Why is this important? It’s hard for us to do the research to know who applied for funds but didn’t receive them in a systemic way. Data.ed.gov allows the public to understand trends in applications for federal funds, not just the awards,and thus get a better view at the demand for federal funds in this issue area.
• Ideation and Challenges: The open innovation portal provides a second crucial functionality to education’s innovation agenda. This portal allows anyone to post challenges on education issues (once they are moderated). In addition, this portal acts as a gathering place for the education community to submit ideas about how to improve our nation’s education system. This platform will plug intowww.challenges.gov once that new government-wide challenges portal is launched in August. This portal allows new issue areas to be identified and collaborated on in a transparent fashion.
• Secondary Market for Education Solutions: The i3 Foundation Registry, in my mind, is the REALLY cool part of this innovation triad. Typically grant programs receive applications, review and score those applications, and then award funds based on the scoring of the applications and the total amount of funding available. There are usually quite a few applications that score relatively well but can’t be funded due to insufficient funds. It’s not a revolutionary concept that federal funds are often not able to meet the demand for funding in many fields. What makes the foundation registry so cool is that it allows foundations that would be likely to fund innovative solutions in this issue area to find grant applications that weren’t successful in receiving federal funds. This site creates a secondary market for innovative education solutions.

You may have heard of kiva.org, a non-profit that connects people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty (see how kiva works). “Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe. By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending.” [2] On this site, anyone can donate to an entrepreneur a world away that might just need $200 to start their business. Lenders are paid back in full 98.78% of the time [2]. Often time, the entrepreneur just needs some start-up capital that doesn’t have prohibitive interest rates. Kiva allows multiple lenders to combine their resources to fund one entrepreneur. Some quick stats:

• Total value of all loans made through Kiva: $150,250,250
• Number of Kiva Users who have funded a loan: 468,971 [2]

Kiva created a way for lenders to find projects they’d be likely to fund through the power of the internet. The i3 foundation registry has done something very similar, albeit for projects that require much more funding. By displaying the grant applications that could not be funded, foundations that would be likely to fund these types of projects are able to find possible investment opportunities.Partnerships will be possible that would likely never have been possible before. Foundations are able to identify projects that might not have been on their radar before.

The i3 grant program is a pilot in innovative and open grant making—sharing more information throughout the grant process to leverage secondary markets to fill the funding gap between the federal supply of funds and the demand for funding.

This concept has recently had me thinking a lot about other critical issue areas where this model might work:

• Health research
• Transportation solutions
• Sustainable community development
• Energy research

The challenge in many of these problem areas however is who would constitute to secondary market. At least in transportation, many of the interested parties would largely be for-profit entities, not non-profit foundations like in education. So I turn the question around on you: In what other major issue areas for the U.S. government could open grant making principles be leveraged? What would the challenges be? Where could possible funders be better connected with those innovative solution providers out there?

As always, please feel free to reach out at any time during this series to continue to conversation.

Jenn

[1] http://www2.ed.gov/programs/innovation/factsheet.html

[2] http://www.kiva.org/about/facts

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog for a special featured Govloop series when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Innovative Partnerships: There’s More than One Way to Build a Road

In the last posting for my featured Govloop series and Phase One Consulting Group’s “Transformation in the Federal Sector” blog, otherwise known as “jennovation”, I highlighted the major motivations for public-private partnerships. In the discussion resulting from that posting, it was clear that there was some confusion about what forms public-private partnerships can take. Are contracts and partnerships one in the same? Are grants a form of partnership? Furthermore, and more importantly, are all forms of partnership equally supported and scrutinized by the Government? There are many different forms that public-private partnerships can take. Figure 1 displays some of the partnership structures that are common depending on the degree of private and public sector involvement they require.

Figure 1: Types of Partnerships based on the Degree of Public and Private Involvement [1]

However, there isn’t a “one size fits all” partnership structure for similar service provisions. To illustrate that point, let’s look at two similar road construction projects that used very different partnership structures to provide a new transportation option for the public: The Dulles Toll Road Extension in Virginia and the I-595 Express in Florida.

Dulles Toll Road Extension (Virginia)

Now known as the “Dulles Greenway”, this road construction project kicked off in the late 1980’s, when a group of private developers proposed that a 14-mile road extension be built starting at the airport and ending in Leesburg, VA. When first proposed, the Commonwealth of Virginia did not authorize private roads to be built. So the coalition’s first stop was Richmond, where they worked with lawmakers to pass the Virginia Highway Corporation Act of 1988 that authorized private roads in Virginia.

In 1990, the $200 million project became the first private, for-profit toll road authorized in Virginia since 1816. But this was only after the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) submitted a competing proposal for what a VDOT built, owned, and operated road would cost. One of the largest arguments for the public road was the projected toll costs over the 30 year life of the project. However after independent financial analysis scrutinized both proposals, it was found that the toll required to maintain the road would exceed $3.50 per car for BOTH options. However, the private option could be built much quicker. [2]

Readers from the DC area, ever wonder why the toll on that road is so “high”? Well folks, it’s largely because that road never would have been built without those tolls paying back the upfront construction costs and ongoing maintenance expenses. In this partnership, the tolls you pay, go back into the pockets of the private developers that paid to build the road.

In the end a road was built that required significant public oversight, but that was largely privately developed. The road opened for traffic in 1984 and is currently owned and operated by a private group known as the Toll Road Investors Partnership II. This example of road construction and maintenance was much more towards that bottom end of the spectrum—private involvement—in Figure 1.

I-595 Express (Central/South Florida)

Let’s fast forward nearly two decades. This roadway improvement project, including the construction of several express toll lanes, began in 2009 and is expected to be completed in the spring of 2014. The road construction project is being implemented as a public-private partnership between the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) and a private concessionaire—the I-595 Express, LLC (ACS Infrastructure Development)—to design, build, finance, operate, and maintain the roadway for a 35-year agreement term. This is particular type of concession contract, one of the partnership types listed in Figure 1. With this concession contract, the FDOT has more control over the roadway than VDOT does with the Dulles Greenway. Among its partnership responsibilities FDOT will: provide management oversight of the contract; install, test, operate and maintain all tolling equipment for the express lanes; set the toll rates; and retain the toll revenue.

But if the private company is not retaining the toll revenue, how are they profiting from this partnership? What’s particularly interesting about this road construction project is that it is the first U.S. application of availability payments to a transportation project. Meaning…

• “I-595 Express, LLC will receive no compensation from FDOT until the facility is fully operational. Upon FDOT’s final acceptance of the project construction, I-595 Express, LLC will be eligible to receive a series of annual lump sum final acceptance payments, including potential incentive bonuses for completing a series of interim milestones (related to major construction activities) within established contractual deadlines.”
• “Performance-based availability payments will be made monthly during the operating period of the project. A maximum availability payment of $65.9 million (in 2009 dollars) begins in 2014 and escalates annually. If quality and performance requirements stipulated in the contract as well as availability of the roadways to traffic are not met, then the availability payments will be subject to downward adjustment in accordance with the contract.” [3]

In this case, oversight of construction and operations are much stricter—as would be expected with a partnership that has MORE public involvement on the partnership spectrum. However, in both cases:

• road improvement projects are completed;
• private partners are crucial for financing the construction and operation; and
• private companies profit off of publicly used infrastructure.

Ultimately the end result would not have been possible without public and private sector involvement. Neither could have done it completely alone—though there were many options for HOW they could partner.

Hopefully these examples show that although the most common partnership arrangement are contracts and grants, that there are several other partnership “vehicles” that government’s have to produce public value. These options might just not be on their radar. As always, please feel free to reach out to me at any time during this series to continue to conversation.

Jenn

[1] Gustetic, Jennifer. A Framework for Understanding and Designing Partnerships in Emergency Preparedness and Response. Cambridge, MA: MIT Libraries, 2007. [2] Gomez-Ibanez, Jose A; Meyer, John R. The Dulles Toll Road Extension. Kennedy School of Government Case Program. 1995. [3] AASHTO Center for Excellence in Project Finance. I-595 Corridor Roadway Improvements. http://transportation-finance.org/projects/i_595_corridor_improv.aspx

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog for a special featured Govloop series when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Don’t Go it Alone: Why Public-Private Partnerships Make Sense

Welcome to the second posting of my featured Govloop blog series—Jennovation—coming to you every other Monday. This series contains my musings on innovation, Open Government (Open Gov) and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). Let me start by saying, I was rather surprised by the comments on my first posting. While Gov 2.0, Open Gov and innovation have been hot topics recently, the majority of the comments on my first posting (both on Govloopand Phase One Consulting Group’s blog) focused on PPPs and the potential for partnerships. I am a HUGE PPP nerd/fanatic, so the fact the readers latched onto that topic and are asking for more information on that subject made me very, very excited. So, for the next few postings I’ll focus on PPPs with a pinch of Open Gov and innovation thrown in. Several comments from the community inspired this posting in particular, including the following one made by the International Consortium on Governmental Financial Management (ICGFM):

“There is a lot of concern about the impact of PPPs on government risk. (Notion that the government is on the hook for PPPs should there be failures.) It also tends to move expenditures off the balance sheet to give the illusion of fiscal discipline. And, there is the opportunity for PPPs to be used for short term budget balancing at the expense of future commitments. There have been some disappointing results in the UK. There is no question that the private sector has demonstrated certain efficiencies. These potential advantages must be weighed against risks.”

I couldn’t agree more that no partnership should be entered into without first weighing the benefits, costs, and risks. In my research [1], there are typically eight factors that drive the desire to partner or privatize:

1. Resources
2. Information
3. Productivity
4. Legitimacy
5. Cost-reduction
6. Risk-sharing
7. Introduction of competition
8. Accountability

Thus in theory, sharing of risk is one of the reasons partnerships emerge in the first place. Many services may not ever be provided if it weren’t for partnerships—since the risks would be too large for any one party to bear by themselves. In fact, one expertise of the private sector is to calculate how much risk should cost. Risks in large project or service partnerships can include completion risk, performance risk, market risk, economic risk, political risk, equity risks, and force majeure. “By partnering with the private sector, the Government is able to relieve the burden of carrying all those risks and shed some to the private sector who may be able to bear them more effectively. For example, the private sector is often more apt at bearing some forms of performance risk since their profit is directly tied to performance metrics.” [1]

The public sector and the private sector are driven by very different things. A partnership should leverage existing incentive structures to ensure that goals are uniformly pursued by all parties and that conflicting incentives don’t jeopardize results, as pointed out by the ICGFM. Fiscal discipline is often MORE of a motivator for the private sector than the government. “Whereas a private firm generally prospers by satisfying paying customers, a monopolistic public agency can prosper even if the customer remains unsatisfied. When a private company performs poorly, it tends to go out of business; when a public agency performs poorly, it often gets a bigger budget. Paradoxically, the budget can grow even as customer dissatisfaction grows; in this respect a rising crime rate is good for a police department, a housing shortage is good for a housing agency, and an epidemic is good for a health department.” [2]

Bottom line: Partnerships are complex and should not be entered into lightly. This goes for large-scale infrastructure development projects, event focused partnerships, and partnerships that focus on providing a specific service for periods of time.

Open Government and innovation focused partnerships are no different. Apps contests? Prizes to address our grand challenges? Enhanced collaboration to achieve Open Gov objectives? ANY partnership that is entered into by the federal government should be carefully considered. In addition to figuring out the motivators of each partner so the right risk sharing structure can be set up, the following questions are also crucially important for any Government agency to consider. (Beware: if you don’t have a best friend in your legal shop and you’re interested in setting up some partnerships, now’s the time to bake cookies for the 9th floor…)

1. Will the partnership require any resources (financial or human capital) to operate? If so, who’s contributing the resources? If a non-governmental organization is paying for anything at all (financial or in-kind) agencies will have to pay close attention to their gift authority. Can the agency accept gifts? Under what terms? Consult your legal counsel…
2. How does the partnership further the agencies mission? Appropriated resources (property, staff, and dollars) must further the mission of the agency.
3. How will the Government support to partnership from an advertising standpoint? There are VERY strict laws on what agencies and government employees can do with regards to endorsements and advertising. Consult your legal counsel…
4. What will be produced through the partnership? Who owns it when the partnership is completed? Negotiating intellectual property splits up front is critical to ensure each partner is getting what they expect out of the partnership. Consult your legal counsel…
5. What is the background of the potential partners? Are there any potential ethical, lobbying, or perception issues with particular partners? Consult your legal counsel…
6. Did you give other potential partners a chance to join the partnership? “Sole-sourcing” a partnership is often possible, but can jeopardize the legitimacy of the partnership, so allowing the breadth of possible partners to compete for the chance to participate is optimal. This area, in particular, is a space where new Gov 2.0 technologies have allowed partnership opportunities to become more open and have allowed more potential partners to step forward.

Partnerships have the potential to add a TON of value, but they require a decent amount of homework to do right.

Though this posting was a bit more research and background info oriented, in future postings I will highlight some of the really cool PPPs from yesterday and today (per Andrew Krzmarzick’s suggestion). As always, please feel free to reach out to me at any time during this series to continue to conversation.

Happy almost 4th of July!

Jenn

[1] Gustetic, Jennifer. A Framework for Understanding and Designing Partnerships in Emergency Preparedness and Response. Cambridge, MA: MIT Libraries, 2007.

[2] Savas, E.S. Privatization and Public Private Partnerships. New York, NY: Chatham House Publishers, 2000.

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog for a special featured Govloop series when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Leveraging Innovation, Open Government, and Public-Private Partnerships to Create Public Value

Welcome to the first posting of the Jennovation blog series! As a featured blogger on Govloop, I will be posting every other Monday, beginning June 14, 2010, about my musings on innovation, Open Government (Open Gov) and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). But how to these three—seemingly loosely connected subject areas—relate enough to justify being lumped together? In my opinion, innovation, Open Gov and PPPs are some of the most effective means for the Government to maximize the public value it provides.

A great example of a government program that demonstrates embraces all three strategies is the Department of Education’s Open Innovation Portal. The Open Innovation Portal is self-described as “a collaborative community designed to identify, improve, and implement innovative solutions to educational challenges.”

How does it further Open Gov principles? This web-based portal embodies the principles of participation and collaboration by providing a gathering place for education stakeholders to participate in the problem solving process and identify opportunities to partner to create public value. The portal uses many web 2.0 functions, including allowing users to:

• Rate solutions and fellow members (think Amazon or eBay).
• Connect with other members (think Facebook or LinkedIn).
• Post classifieds to seek or offer services (think Craigslist).
• Earn points for participating (think loyalty programs).

How does it encourage and leverage PPPs? The Open Innovation Portal allows PPPs to assemble based on common ideas and needs to provide value to the education community. Through the ideation functionality, the best ideas float to the top, where they attract the attention of other innovators, potential funders, or contributors of in-kind resources.

How does it encourage innovation? The Portal allows members to post challenges relating to education, ask questions relating to challenges, contribute helpful comments on challenges, and rate other user’s ideas. The discussion helps innovators improve the quality of their ideas, for submission to other Portal challenges or external grant programs. “The Portal is itself an innovation in education.”

However, all government programs need not utilize components of all three strategies to create value—it’s just extremely cool and forward thinking when they do. Throughout this series I will strive to create a variety of postings that:

• Inform readers of academic and practitioner research in innovation, Open Gov and PPPs;
• Share my opinion on to how to most effectively drive these practices in the Federal Sector and overcome obstacles to their acceptance; and
• Stimulate conversation by identifying hard situations/questions and providing an opportunity for crowd sourced solutions.

Also, as an innovation and Open Gov advocate, I believe in the value of ideation for identifying problems, issue areas and topics that might not be on my radar—but are on yours! In the spirit of acknowledging what I don’t know, I’d also like to ask you, the reader, to feel free to reach out to me, at any time during this series, and request a blog posting on a specific topic in these subject areas. I’ll do my best to work with you to identify interesting spins on the topic, research the topic fully, and share our collective thoughts in this series—even co-author if you’d like. To make this series as rich as possible, I’m committed to adhering to the principles of transparency, participation and collaboration in its creation.

To kick-off the series, I’ll ask a simple question: How do YOU define Innovation, Open Government and Public Private Partnerships? For this series, I am starting with the following definitions/scope. What do you think?

• Innovation: “Fundamentally, innovation is the development of new products, services, and processes.” [1] Following Schumpeter, contributors to the scholarly literature on innovation typically distinguish between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully in practice. [2]
• Open Government: “The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government. Transparency promotes accountability by providing the public with information about what the Government is doing. Participation allows members of the public to contribute ideas and expertise so that their government can make policies with the benefit of information that is widely dispersed in society. Collaboration improves the effectiveness of Government by encouraging partnerships and cooperation within the Federal Government, across levels of government, and between the Government and private institutions.” [3]
• Public-Private Partnership: “A partnership is a collaboration among business, non-profit organizations and Government in which risks, resources and skills are shared in projects that benefit each partner as well as the community”. [4] Furthermore, Donahue and Zechauser define PPPs/Collaborative Governance as the “pursuit of authoritatively chosen public goals by means that include engaging the effort of, and sharing discretion with, producers outside the Government.” [5]

The goal of this blog series is to demonstrate how these methods can be used in combination to maximize the value that the Government provides to the citizen. Looking forward to discussing these exciting subjects with you!

[1] The White House’s “A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs”, page 4. [2] Schumpeter, Joseph (1934). The Theory of Economic Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [3] The Open Government Directive [4] Osbourne, Stephen P., ed Public Private Partnership: Theory and Practice in International Perspective. London, UK: Routledge Advances in Management and Business Studies, 2000. P 11 [5] Donahue, John and Richard Zechauser, “Public Private collaboration” “Oxford Handbook of Public Policy. Ed. Robert Goodin, Michael Moran, and Martin Rein. UK: Oxford University Press, 2006. P 430

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog for a special featured Govloop series when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Lessons for Driving the President’s Innovation Agenda through Prizes and Competitions

On April 30, 2010, over 200 public and private sector participants convened at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to think big about how the Government can learn from the emerging trend to use prizes and competitions to solve some of the grand challenges of our time. This event, led by Robynn Sturm from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, built on the President’s Innovation Agenda and the Open Government Initiative by stressing some key concepts:

• We have an opportunity to identify and scope problems and national challenges like never before;
• There are many ways – some traditional and some relatively new – to identify a variety of possible solutions to those challenges;
• The process employed to develop those solutions could lead to innovations that have never before been possible; and
• The government has an opportunity to strategically leverage the principles of Open Government (transparency, participation and collaboration) to drive and support these innovation efforts.

Throughout the day, an impressive lineup of thought leaders and practitioners shared their expertise and knowledge about these core concepts—some far-reaching and some refreshingly practical—with the Government-focused audience. With a waitlist as long as the attendance list, the event was structured to capture knowledge for the folks that couldn’t attend through liveblogging, tweeting, webcasting, and content repositories. Beth Noveck and Aman Bhandari liveblogged on the keynote speakers’ presentations and the lunchtime interview with Vivek Kundra, the US Chief Information Officer. Several attendees tweeted throughout the day under the hashtag #opengov. The Case Foundation, co-sponsors of the event, provided live webcasting on their Promoting Innovation webpage, from which they will generously provide all the materials and video from the event.

Already, attendees are beginning to share their impressions of the event. Micah Sifry, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, captured his thoughts in a blog post on prizes, challenges and government innovation. In that spirit, this post summarizes some of my key take-aways from attending the event. In addition, I would highly recommend that you take the time to read through the resources listed at the end of this posting—they are invaluable to understanding the President’s vision for innovation, the potential for prizes to drive innovation in government, and the linkages between innovation and Open Government.

I took several important lessons from Jonathan Bays, a Consultant in McKinsey & Company’s Social Sector Office and one of the keynote speakers, including:

• Prizes don’t need to be monetary or recognition-based. McKinsey’s report on prizes describes six different types of prizes that create value and change.
• There are many reasons why prizes work; it’s not just the money. Goal, Glory, Guts, and Gold all motivate participants.
• A surge in capital has become available for prizes over the last decade— at an 18% growth rate per year. With more funding comes an increasing opportunity to leverage these methods to solve more problems.
• Prizes can and should be combined with other traditional funding mechanisms (like grants and contracts) if the problem solvers can’t accept all the risk associated with pursuing a solution. For example, the targeted use of grants can push possible solvers through the proof of concept phase.
• Prizes are only part of the “portfolio of actions” directed at the overall aspiration. After the challenge/competition is conducted it is critical to continue to build the legacy and reinforce the impact.

The first keynote speaker, Peter H. Diamandis, the Chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, also shared some important observations about the value and operation of successful prizes:

• Prizes have the potential to apply a significant multiplier to the initial investment. Peter has observed that prizes incentivize the investment of resources at a rate of 10-40x the prize amount. For example, the teams that competed for the $10M Ansari X prize collectively invested over $100M in their efforts.
• Prizes reinvent philanthropy and procurement by changing the paradigm about how much value can be created for each dollar invested. Many non-profits are accustomed to a 30-cent return on the dollar, whereas prizes have a multiplier effect.
• Great prizes that aim to expose solutions to grand challenges require a long term commitment. Some of the most revolutionary prizes have taken 3 to 8 years to demonstrate progress.
• Visionary prizes grow industries by mobilizing capital, encouraging the definition of multiple viable solutions to problems, encouraging those solutions to be brought to market and compete for business, and creating profit and jobs.

The great challenge for the audience that attended the event on Friday is to translate those lessons into a viable approach for the government to strategically leverage the potential of prizes. The federal government faces many unique challenges in this space:

• The vast majority of agencies’ authorized funds focus on contracts and grants as the primary means for partnering with non-governmental entities. Over $1 Trillion is authorized for grants and contracts in the President’s budget, with only a small fraction of those funds able to be used for innovative means, such as prizes and competitions.
• Many agencies lack the partnership authority to create the optimal arrangement of public and private partners to tackle their most pressing problems.
• The default problem solving mentality of the government focuses on leveraging internal expertise and resources, grants, contracts and/or other formal arrangements. Prizes are not typically considered as a viable option.
• Federal employees are neither empowered to nor tasked with identifying and managing innovative ways to partner and solve problems.

Despite these challenges, this is an extremely exiting time for the federal government. This is a time where innovation, public-private partnerships, and technology solutions are creating a perfect storm for generating huge leaps in solving the grand challenges of our time, including: energy and the environment, development and human rights, transportation, health, education, exploration, and life sciences. We have the opportunity to inject disruptive thinking into the way the government organizes to deliver results. The White House is committed to helping the federal government overcome its challenges, leverage lessons learned and best practices from the private sector, and identify new opportunities for innovation. In fact, Beth Noveck closed the event by announcing that a new community of practice, led by the White House, will be formed around this topic to keep the conversation/inter-agency collaboration going.

We look forward to joining that dialogue and helping to move the Innovation Agenda forward.

Key Resources:

• The White House’s “A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs”
• OMB’s “Open Government Directive”
• McKinsey’s “And the winner is…: Capturing the Promise of Philanthropic Prizes”
• Knight Foundation’s “Information and Communication Contests: An Analysis”
• OMB’s “Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes to Promote Open Government”

Examples of Innovation and Prizes in Action:

• Department of Education Innovation Portal
• Ashoka’s Changemakers
• XPrize Foundation
• Apps for Democracy

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Gov 2.0 Efforts are Selfish, and Rightly Should Be

Last week at a Gov 2.0 event sponsored by Fedscoop I had great conversations with several government 2.0 rockstars. But one conversation and one statement in particular really resonated with me. Gwynne Kostin from GSA, in her brilliance, said:

“Participation and collaboration are selfish activities. Most people don’t participate or collaborate without wanting to gain something in return.”

This isn’t a revolutionary concept in itself, but it does shed a different light on the types of initiatives that have largely been pursued in the spirit of openness. Even though the rhetoric in the Open Government community has been increasingly about tying new initiatives to strategic goals, much of the action has demonstrated a “if you build it, they will come” mentality. Often the things that are easy to do in transparency, participation and collaboration aren’t those things that have a discrete tie to the mission of the organization: standing up a twitter account, starting a blog, creating an iphone app, opening up ideation tools, etc… I’m not saying that these activities can’t be incredibly valuable, if done right. However, there are countless examples of services, products, and programs that demonstrate “what we CAN do” and not “what we SHOULD do”.

“What we should do” must be strategic, and provide value both for the provider (government) and the consumer (the public, stakeholder groups, academia, industry, etc…). People will only participate and collaborate if they can get something discrete and valuable out of the experience. Gwynne’s statement made me think that a large part of what we “should do” is not wholly reinvent the process for identifying how to effectively partner to solve business problems. Individuals and groups have been partnering forever to solve problems. Gov 2.0 just gives us some new methods for partnering that are more mobile, real-time and individualized.

This got me thinking about partnership theory, which was the subject of mymaster’s thesis. Mark Moore from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has done significant writing since the 1990s about the key issues that should be considered by public managers before they commit themselves and their organizations to specific actions. The following issues constitute what is known as the “strategic triangle”:

• “First, what is the important “public value (PV)” the organization is seeking to produce?
• Second, what are the “sources of legitimacy and support (L&S)” that would be relied upon to authorize the organization to take action and provide the resources necessary to sustain the effort to create the value?
• Third, what “operational capabilities (OC)” (including new investments and innovations) would the organization rely on (or have to develop) to deliver the desired results?”

Furthermore, PV, L&S and OC can be provided in various degrees by multiple people or groups. This is where partnership comes in. For example, if the OC is fully provided by the private sector, the partnership may likely be a contracting arrangement.

These are the SAME questions that we must ask when designing participation and collaboration initiatives through the Open Government Initiatives. But how is partnership in this sense selfish? It’s in its very definition. Without public value—the “so what” for the consumer—the action doesn’t have enough legs to stand on.

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Key Area to Consider in Open Government Planning: Legal

Importance of Legal Issues in Open Government Planning: There are a host of legal issues that all transparency, participation, and collaboration initiatives will face. These legal constraints have been enormous hurdles for Agencies in engaging the public in decision making. For example, one of the best known hurdles is the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA). This Act prevents Agencies from asking more than 10 citizens the same question (regardless of if it’s voluntary) with uniform answers, unless Agencies go through a long process with the Office of Management and Budget to get approval of those questions. It is important for Agencies to understand the entire legal environment that will influence their Open Government initiatives from the start to manage downstream risks (i.e., so they don’t discover they are breaking the law down the line). The following is a list of some high level legal issues and the corresponding legislation that will impact Open Government planning efforts. This list is not comprehensive but it should give you an idea of the wide scope of legal issues that must be considered in Open Government planning.

• Government Soliciting Feedback from Citizens: Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) 5 USC Section 3, Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) (44 U.S.C. Chapter 35)
• Records Management: National Archives and Records Administration Act of 1984/ Federal Records Act
• Security: Agency Statute, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, etc…
• Content Liability, which includes defamation, harassment, copyright, trademark, and negligent misstatement/ fraud: Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996
• Terms of Service: Anti-Deficiency Act
• Privacy: Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), E-Government Act of 2002, Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and Privacy Act
• Accessibility: Americans with Disabilities Act/ Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
• Rulemaking: Administrative Procedure Act (APA) of 1946
• • Acquisition: Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR)

This legislation must be considered as policies governing the use of various social media and other Gov 2.0 tools are developed for your Agency including: access, moderation, comment, advertising, records management, open format data, and employee use policies. During this activity, it could be useful for the Office of General Counsel to consider the questions highlighted here.

Linkages with the Open Government Directive: There are several requirements in the Open Government Directive that call specifically for legal understanding, including:

• Open Gov plans must “include any proposed changes to internal management and administrative policies to improve transparency, participation and collaboration”. Internal policies are developed based on an Agency’s enabling legislation and its legal requirements. Thus in order to establish robust policies, the legal environment must be fully understood. (page 10, Open Gov Directive)
• Open Gov plans must “include innovative methods, such as prizes and competitions, to obtain ideas from and to increase collaboration with those in the private sector, non-profit, and academic communities” The FAR makes it very difficult for Agencies to issue prizes. However, the Open Gov Directive tasks Agencies, as well as OMB, to attempt to find innovative ways to issue prizes through competitions while operating within the law. (page 10, Open Gov Directive)
• “Within 120 days, the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), in consultation with the Federal Chief Information Officer and the Federal Chief Technology Officer, will review existing OMB policies, such as Paperwork Reduction Act guidance and privacy guidance, to identify impediments to open government and to the use of new technologies and, where necessary, issue clarifying guidance and/or propose revisions to such policies, to promote greater openness in government.” (page 6, Open Gov Directive)

(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)

Key Areas to Consider in Open Government Strategy and Planning

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)

E-gov Versus Open Gov: The Evolution of E-democracy

One of the first questions I asked myself when familiarizing myself with the Open Government initiative was: “How is the Obama Administration’s Open Government (Open Gov) initiative different from the Bush Administration’s E-government (E-gov) initiative?” There are many people who use the two terms interchangeably but this paper argues that although they are distinct initiatives in the United States, they are also part of the same E-democracy maturity continuum. Thus while they should not be handled totally separately, they should not be combined either. This blog post provides a high level summary of the findings and recommendations described in more detail in a corresponding white paper. The E-government efforts of the last decade and the new Open Government initiative share many similar goals and characteristics, the largest being that they both strive to make the Federal Government more transparent. However, they are not synonymous. They are different efforts that are overlapping phases in an incremental growth towards E-democracy. Open Gov can be seen as an evolution of E-gov. Open Gov would not be possible without the outcomes created by E-gov and the advances made in technology (including social media (a.k.a. Web 2.0 or Gov 2.0) and cloud computing), policy (including OMB attempts to amend the current legal/policy environment), and culture (an employee workforce more accustomed to transparency) over the last decade. E-gov was a first and crucial step towards E-democracy. However, the Open Gov initiative is not the end-state solution. It is the most recent maturation of the Federal Government’s growth towards E-democracy, but it is not the final step. There will likely be an initiative that follows Open Government as a new future Administration enters the White House and as tools grow and the culture of the Federal Government evolves.

Some key similarities and differences between the two initiatives are highlighted below. For more detail on each of the following assertions, please see this short E-Gov and Open Gov white paper.

• The E-gov efforts are directly enabled by law, but the Open Gov initiative is not.
• E-gov and Open Gov both produce significant advances in Federal transparency, but Open Gov should also produce more participation and collaboration mechanisms.
• E-gov and Open Gov both are “unfunded mandates” and must be implemented with existing resources.
• E-gov and Open Gov both rely heavily on web-enabled technology adoption, but many Open Government-related technologies (i.e. social media tools) are rapidly evolving.
• E-gov has largely become a compliance exercise for the Chief Information Officer (CIO), but Open Gov expands the responsibility for openness outside the CIO organization.

OMB should strive to delay, for as long as possible, the point at which the momentum supporting Open Gov is converted to devoting staff time to a reporting compliance exercise. Some reporting is valuable and necessary to ensure broad milestones are met across the Federal Government. However, just how far Open Gov will take us towards E-democracy will be highly determined by how effectively culture changes as a result of this effort—not how frequently or well Agencies report. There are several opportunities to direct the Open Gov momentum onto the right track right now—and there is a narrow window. OMB should focus on the following opportunities to help avoid a compliancy fate:

• Provide Agencies with tools and methodologies to implement the Open Government Directive in order to prevent an attitude of compliant reporting. The Department of Transportation has started developing such a best practice methodology.
• Support and facilitate best practice sharing and shared services to ease Open Government adoption since most Open Government efforts are not funded.
• Tie in Enterprise Architecture from the beginning of the effort in order to identify where cost savings through IT consolidation can be applied to new Open Gov efforts.
• Re-evaluate how E-gov and Open Gov efforts and reporting should and could be combined to eliminate redundant reporting requirements on the Agencies.
• Advocate for authorization and appropriation for a PMO for E-democracy efforts that encompass both E-gov and Open Gov.

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Open Government is Change Management… On Steroids

Giovanni Carnaroli, the associate CIO for IT policy oversight at the Department of Transportation, and Jenn Gustetic from Phase One Consulting Group presented at the Open Government: Strategies and Tactics from the Play Book event last week. For those of you that couldn’t make it, we are introducing our thoughts about how to approach Open Government to you on the blogosphere with this posting:

• Open Government planning is about more than tools and technology. It is about the “trinity” of Technology, Policy and Culture.
• Developing and using a comprehensive Open Government framework is possible and it can help you stay on track throughout the program lifecycle.
• Engaging an interdisciplinary leadership and planning team from the beginning is crucial to tap into tacit knowledge and mitigate risks.

We feel that Open Government is ultimately about driving innovation through collaboration. We are heading towards that goal by getting the right people at the leadership table from the beginning and by following a framework that is focused, comprehensive and flexible in an attempt to avoid as many downstream issues as possible. We have incorporated the technology, policy and cultural elements that are essential to understand in any Open Government effort into a framework that will enable Agencies to meet their strategic objectives, mitigate risks, and improve performance through their Open Government Plan. This framework will help you answer two questions: “how should I approach managing the change required for a more Open Government?” and “who should I involve in Open Government?”

We hope that this framework will serve as the starting point for an Open Government best practice methodology (similar to FSAM), developed through a multi-agency effort.

How should I approach managing the change required for a more Open Government?

Bottom line, the Open Gov initiative represents a shift in the way we engage with the public and innovate. This is change management…on steroids.

And how do you traditionally manage change and business transformation? Through a pretty basic lifecycle management approach; assess, plan, implement, measure, and improve. But how do you assess your current state? How do you plan for your desired state? That’s where the “wheel” you see on the graphic below comes in. The wheel acknowledges that the technology, policy and culture components at your organization are all critical to understand before moving into planning. Some people see these areas as hurdles they must overcome, and others see them as resources. We see them each as unique and crucial areas for transformation throughout the Open Gov lifecycle.

POCG is proud to have supported DOT in the development of this framework

For technology, we suggest the critical areas include security, infrastructure, tools and current pilots and programs. For policy we suggest the areas are strategic planning, performance, legal and internal directives. And finally for culture we suggest the critical areas are employee readiness, communication channels, agency stakeholders, and those areas where the agency is already participating with the public, albeit not through Gov 2.0 tools. We will be releasing another blog series soon that will run through each of these areas in detail.

Note that each critical area and the corresponding activities in the five lifecycle phases can be thought of as a “cake slice”. There are distinct activities associated with the assess, plan, implement, measure, and improve phases of the each of the key areas that the appropriate office should be heavily involved in.

Who should be involved in Open Gov strategy and planning at your organization? On the framework graphic, there is a grey ring around the color wheel that contains various offices within the organization. This ring highlights what office tends to be the subject matter expert in each of these crucial areas. Walking around the circle, this framework shows that the chief information officer, project managers for key mission areas, public affairs, human resources, chief financial officer, general counsel, and policy development offices should all be engaged in the leadership and planning of an Open Gov effort. If you want more detail about what each of these offices tend to care about in the Open Gov space, check out the “Open Gov leadership team” blog series we released in October.

Bottom line: It’s important to involve folks from each of these critical areas at the beginning of the effort in order to tap into their tacit knowledge and ensure downstream challenges are mitigated.

Open Government strategy and planning is not about picking one tool and running with it. It is about fundamentally changing the way the Federal government interacts with citizens and its employees to reduce costs, improve decision making, mitigate risks, and stimulate innovation. That is a huge endeavor but this framework organizes the chaos and may enable you to more effectively tie agency strategic goals and performance targets to Open Government transformation efforts.

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Open Gov Partner Approach: Office of Human Resources (HR)

Motivations: The Office of Human Resources (HR) is responsible for managing the staffing function of the organization, administering employee benefits, evaluating performance of employees, assessing employee satisfaction, providing dispute resolution and mediation services, and driving towards a model workplace. HR shops value the consistent and fair treatment of all employees. They ensure employees are fulfilled, developed, and supported in their workplace, and that a safe and confidential space for employees to resolve disputes is provided. HR shops adhere to the needs of the employees and work alongside internal operations teams, so tend to have less interaction with the public than the other Open Gov involved offices, except for recruitment efforts. Thus, HR shops have a unique pulse on the nature of an organization’s workforce: their technological maturity, their adaptability, their satisfaction, and their skills sets. Open Gov Programs can ultimately help HR shops achieve better results. One Open Gov program that has reached HR and improved employee satisfaction, is the TSA Ideafactory. This internal tool creates a means for thousands of TSA employees to submit ideas for how to advance the organization and improve morale that are then rated and ranked by their peers, evaluated by TSA HQ, and implemented as appropriate. This tool has been wildly successful at TSA and many HR departments are interested in adopting this program (including DHS).

Social media also offers an opportunity for organizations to recruit differently than they have ever before. In addition to the popular job boards (monster, hotjobs, careerbuilder, indeed, etc.), several federal agencies are now posting open positions on twitter, facebook, craigslist, doostang, linkedin and many other networking or social sites—enabling a more diverse and larger population to be targeted for federal jobs.

Approach: Since HR shops understand employees needs uniquely, they require a seat at the Open Gov table. When creating an Open Gov strategy, HR shops will be particularly concerned with the following questions:

• How can gov 2.0 tools create an organizational culture that empowers employees and allows them to better collaborate with one another?
• Will employee codes of conduct need to be modified at all to account for social media use? How will use of social media be regulated?
• Prior to implementation, what legal considerations are important to review? How will these rules and regulations be communicated to employees/users?
• How will Open Gov programs affect employee satisfaction? How will satisfaction be measured?
• How will Open Gov change the way we recruit new employees?
• How “ready” are employees for new ways of collaborating and participating with web-based technologies? How do we encourage employees to use these tools and transform the culture?

Partner’s Bottom Line: HR shops may be an unexpected partner at the Open Gov table. However, their role is critical in transforming the culture of the organization. HR shops should keep in mind the following when participating in Open Gov efforts:

• Catalyze culture change within the organization. Open Gov will only work if new habits are encouraged from the inside out, and the principles of transparency, collaboration and participation are institutionalized. Help other Open Gov partners determine the tools they have to institutionalize these principles.
• Be open. There will be risks with any new Open Gov program and it will be difficult, to predict how employees will receive new programs. But risks should be managed, not be the impetus for the status quo.
• Be realistic. Open Gov programs, like IdeaFactory can achieve significant internal value for organizations in terms of employee satisfaction and cultivating a culture of openness and collaboration. However, these changes are not felt overnight—be patient but realistic in goals for metrics.

(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)

Open Gov Partner Approach: Office of the Chief Financial Officer

Motivations: There are several drivers for Agencies and their OCFO shops to focus on performance management—and many of them are directly related to compliance activities. The following is by no means exhaustive, but demonstrates a few of the Agency performance and budgeting requirements that motivate OCFO’s to be engaged in any business transformation efforts that occur as a result of embracing Open Government principles:

• The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA) shifts “the focus of government decision making, management, and accountability from activities and processes to the results and outcomes achieved by Federal programs.” Under GPRA, annual performance plans must be submitted that outline performance goals, measurement approaches, and the strategies to achieve those goals. (Source: GAO Report)
• Executive Order 13450 – Improving Government Program Performance is the official policy of the Federal Government to spend taxpayer dollars more effectively each year. Agency Performance Improvement Officers (PIOs) must develop and improve the agency’s strategic plans, annual performance plans, and annual performance reports and assist the head of the agency in the development and use within the agency of performance measures in personnel performance appraisals, particularly those of program managers.
• The Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) was “developed to assess and improve program performance so that the Federal government can achieve better results. A PART review helps identify a program’s strengths and weaknesses to inform funding and management decisions aimed at making the program more effective”. (Source: OMB Website) A Federal website,expectmore.gov, displays performance information online for the public.

Approach: OCFO’s must balance a myriad of pressures and priorities when developing the annual budget including performance management and strategic goals alignment. OCFO shops will be concerned with metrics, strategic alignment and the costs associated with any Open Government effort. When standing up an Open Government program, OCFO’s will be particularly concerned with the following questions:

• Do Open Government philosophies and programs enhance an Agency’s focus on their mission?
• Do the efforts support annual performance goals?
• Will senior managers be able to use the performance and financial data that is created through Open Government to manage their programs?
• How do we link agency employees’ appraisals to the agency missions, goals, and outcomes associated with Open Government?
• How will we apply program evaluations (PART) to assess the effectiveness of Open Gov programs?
• What is the full cost of achieving the performance goals associate with Open Government?
• What is the marginal cost of changing performance goals due to Open Government?
• Will budget requests need to be altered as a result of Open Government efforts?
• How do we measure baseline performance targets associated with the Open Government?

Partner’s Bottom Line: In order to implement an Open Government program that considers the answers to each of these questions, OCFO’s should:

• Integrate the Federal-wide goals of transparency, participation and collaboration into strategic planning and performance management for the Agency.
• Work alongside and appreciate the importance of “techies” to understand the scope and possibilities for the effort. This will enable them to understand how technology has evolved and will evolve to assist agencies in meeting the Federal-wide goals of transparency, participation and collaboration.
• Be open. What is defined as “success” and a performance target should be evolving as technology moves forward. We should not continue to pursue outdated targets as possibilities change with technology.

(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)

Open Gov Partner Approach: Office of General Counsel

Motivations: OGC’s primary mission is to provide legal opinions, advice, and services with respect to all agency and departmental programs and activities. OGC’s are charged with ensuring compliance with all federal laws, statutes, and OMB guidance in all Agency activities. They keep the rest of us out of trouble and handle disputes with agency decisions as they emerge. Approach: OGC’s must survey and interpret a host of different information sources to develop a legal opinion on any new government effort, including open government programs. Legal Counsel will review Agency statutes, federal laws, OMB guidance and directives, OMB circulars, and internal Agency policies to advise the client on actions that are legal, illegal, and those that may need slight modification to transfer between the two. This activity can be quite time consuming, especially in areas where substantial case law does not exist (i.e. the questions being asked are new).

When standing up an open government tool, OGC’s will be particularly concerned with the following questions:

• What is your authority for creating this tool or program?
• Are there any statutory constraints or enablers that impact the Agency’s use of open government tools, including security protections?
• Will the tool be collecting information from the public, and if so, will it violate the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA)?
• Are you seeking consensus advice from the public, and if so, will it trigger the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA)?
• Are your tools 508 compliant and do they meet the requirements of all accessibility laws?
• Is the Agency okay with the tools “terms of service”, if it is an established tool?
• Does the program meet all privacy regulations and is a privacy impact assessment (PIA) required?
• If an interaction tool is desired, what should the comment policy say? (This policy details the legal protections for the service provider (aka federal government) with regards to the user generated content.)
• If access is restricted, what is the basis for restricting access and should there be an access policy?
• Is the content on the tool considered a “federal record” and if so, should a disposition schedule be developed?

Partner’s Bottom Line: In order to implement an open government tool that considers the answers to each of these questions, OGC’s should:

• Work alongside the strategists and program developers to understand the purpose of the effort. This will enable them to advise the effort in real-time and prevent most legal issues from emerging down the line, which could slow or completely halt all efforts.
• Be open. Open Government is a new application of several outdated laws (NARA, PRA, FACA, etc…) and OGC’s across the federal government are sharing legal opinions that are flexible but still operate within the boundaries of the law.
• “Approach the tools and issues with an eye to analyzing and managing the actual risk. Too many projects get stalled on unlikely what-if scenarios. Ask, what is the real risk? What is the likelihood of it occurring? Recognizing that some risks may not be tenable, the benefit of openness needs to be prominent in the equation.” (Thanks to Gwynne for contributing)

(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)

Open Gov Partner Approach: Program Offices

Motivations: Program Offices are often those folks that are motivated by outputs and outcomes that most directly relate to the bottom line mission areas of an Agency. They are charged with implementing programs that tie into the strategic goals of the organization and are often the closest to the stakeholders. These folks are closest to the pain points in Agency processes and statutory limitations. They know what they need to be successful but often times face barriers in implementation with the integrating offices (OCIO, OPA, OGC, etc…) so they often “go it alone” and do what works for them in order to meet their mission, not focusing on integrating their efforts with the needs of the entire organization. In a perfect world, they would have access to customizable solutions to help them meet their business needs that have already taken into account the hard legal, policy, technical and performance questions. Approach: Program offices identify a business need, and will fill that gap with the solution that best balances their time, resource, cost and technology limitations. To create these solutions, program offices tend to follow some form of a project management process to design, implement, maintain and improve upon their initiatives, consulting other offices when appropriate.

This approach is no different when programs decide to utilize open government tools. Building a blog, a wiki, or a specialized participation tool requires a project management approach to stand it up, and then program management to maintain and improve upon it. When standing up an open government tool, program offices will be particularly concerned with the following questions:

• What type of information sharing with the stakeholders will help me to achieve my strategic goals more effectively? Will open government tools help my bottom line by making public engagement easier?
• What type of outreach reaches my stakeholders the most effectively? Do those stakeholders have the technological maturity to transition to a primarily online collaboration environment?
• What type of program is realistic to maintain given my personnel, budget and time constraints?
• What tools are available for me to use? Are those tools adequately vetted from a security, privacy and utility perspective?
• How much ability do I have to execute creative license over the tool to customize it for my needs?
• Is there any reason why I can’t do what I want to do (internal policy, statute, the law, etc…)?
• Has an effort like this worked any where else outside my organization or within it?

Partner’s Bottom Line: In order to implement an open government tool that considers the answers to each of these questions, program offices should:

• Work closely with a team of the legal, technical, policy, and performance subject matter experts;
• Follow project management discipline in order to manage risks, costs, schedules and resources; and
• Be provided with a source where Agency best practices and resources can be shared so each program office is not forced to ask these same difficult questions each time a new business need emerges.

(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)

We’re not so Different After All: Touch Points in Open Gov Approaches Preferred by Internal Partners

In our first open government series we talked about how intermediate goals (which reside between the temptation to go straight to “cool tools” and the overall vision of “government as a platform”), are critical to focus on when developing an open government strategy for an Agency that will ultimately help them achieve their mission better. This series drives at another challenge that practitioners face in creating robust open government strategies: who to engage in the leadership of the effort and how to get those people talking the same language. We do this by:

(1) Laying out the motivations and approaches that individual offices would likely take in developing their pieces of an Open Gov strategy; (2) Suggesting some bottom line recommendations for those offices the equip them to be the best possible partner; and (3) Synthesizing those approaches into a common language that can help all the right people work together from the beginning.

The goal of this series is to help make the case for convening as step one an interdisciplinary leadership team to develop an Agency’s Open Government strategy.

Often offices don’t communicate because they believe their processes don’t complement one another. However, this series will demonstrate that all the essential partners aren’t so different after all, and though they may have different terms and general approaches, they share many of the same concerns, requirements and motivations. We will highlight the following offices and their drivers in the coming weeks:

(1) Program Offices (Posted 10/6/09) (2) Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) (Posted 10/8/09) (3) Office of General Counsel (OGC) (Posted 10/15/09) (4) Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) (Posted 10/21/09) (5) Chief Technology Officer (CTO) (Posted 10/23/09) (6) Policy Development Office (Posted 10/26/09) (7) Office of Public Affairs (OPA) (Posted 11/3/09) (8) Human Resources (HR) (Posted 11/10/09)

Please let us know any feedback and whether or not you think any other offices/approaches should be integrated as well. This series will hopefully help practitioners get to “step one” in their open government effort: convening the right people at the table to support the development of a robust and implementable strategy.

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)

Open Government is about Eliminating the Digital Divide (Part 5 of 5 of Series)

This may seem contradictory initially. Doesn’t Gov 2.0 enhance the digital divide by pushing government engagement further away from folks that aren’t equipped with a computer or web-enabled mobile device? The danger of focusing on Gov 2.0 only, considering the digital divide, is that certain populations will be under-represented in the governing process. We can do a lot of “cool” things with Gov 2.0, but some argue that unless we address accessibility we aren’t really transforming government to an equitable platform; we are instead making its operations more inaccessible to certain stakeholder groups. Closing the digital divide and encouraging Gov 2.0 are not mutually exclusive however. You don’t have to choose one or the other—choose both. In fact, some people think that the digital divide is a myth and only a perceived gap—that as cost of use decreases and ease of use increases, the ethnic, racial, and geographical internet access gaps will decrease on their own. (see “The Digital Divide: Facing a Crisis or Creating a Myth by Benjamin M. Compaine) Furthermore, one could argue that Gov 2.0 will increase ease of use as open source applications allow tools to be customized by users so they become more and more useful through each version. However, this is a result that occurs over time and thus government programs should in the interim make sure to consider accessibility issues and prioritize digital equality programming in parallel with Gov 2.0 efforts.

It seems that those places that have had some success in bridging the divide are heavily dependent on programming at the local level. Boston has done some really interesting programming and tried to address the problem from a lot of directions through the Boston Digital Bridge Foundation. This is also a unique time where the federal government is financially supporting broadband technology expansion with stimulus funds and several grant programs including the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP).

As another intermediate goal, we should continue to encourage innovation through Gov 2.0, but also address digital divide issues in parallel through efforts like what they’ve done in Boston. One should not be sacrificed for the other—they just need to be balanced given limited resources. The good news is, a lot of the Gov 2.0 efforts are “free” or low cost compared to the infrastructure heavy investments required for certain digital divide programming.

(Note: Originally posted on the Phase One Consulting Group, Government Transformation Blog when I was an employee there. www.phaseonecg.com/blog)