Open gov: what works and what doesn’t

Technology

Open gov: what works and what doesn’t

Open government is at risk of going on “life support” unless agencies take a new approach, writes Andrea DiMaio in the Gartner blog. DiMaio says...

Federal News Network Staff

January 19, 2011 4:48 pm

1 min read

Open government is at risk of going on “life support” unless agencies take a new approach, writes Andrea DiMaio in the Gartner blog.

DiMaio says agencies have practically outsourced open gov duties to experts. There is also a trend of agencies following best practices that may not be the most effective.

He writes, “The key question is not ‘who has done what before?’, but ‘how can I apply these principles to my specific situation?’. Good practices are a source of inspiration, but only after having done one’s homework about relevance and priorities in relation to the agency’s strategic objectives.”

The recently launched OpenGovernment.org is an example of applying principles from one idea — in this case, OpenCongress.org — and creating a new open gov platform, O’Reilly Radar.

Ultimately, though, open gov will succeed not on the relationship between people and technological platform but between people and people, writes Joe Shepley in the Enterprise 2.0 blog.

He writes, “The way I see it, the need for these technologies drove their creation and widespread adoption, not the other way around.”

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