Online Deliberation and

The United States Open Government

InitiativeLisa Blomgren Bingham

Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs

Bloomington, Indiana

OverviewThe Legal Framework for Online Deliberation in

the US Federal Government

The Open Government Initiative: Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration

The Open Government Dialogue: An Experiment

The Open Government Directive: More Input than Deliberation

The Legal Framework for Online Deliberation

Administrative Procedure, Freedom of Information, and Sunshine Acts Limited role for public participation, none for deliberation Silent on online participation Framed in terms of information transparency and access

E-Government Act of 2002: Authorizes online participation in rulemaking

Federal Document Management System (FDMS) has a single agency and public interface for 170 rulemaking entities.

The public can view materials and submits comments through single uniform website, www.regulations.gov.

No user participation in design, closed architecture, not interactive, no online deliberation.

The Open Government Initiative (OGI)

President Obama issued an Executive Memorandum on Transparent and Open Government

OGI umbrella: Government should beTRANSPARENTPARTICIPATORYCOLLABORATIVE

Open Government Dialogue

Open Government Directive

Open Government Plans

OGI: Transformative Transparency

People need information to participate and deliberate.

Data.gov

USApending.gov

Apps.gov

Recovery.gov

Leveraging public

Private Sector Aps

OGI: Open Government Dialogue

Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in Office of Management and Budget, White House

Open Government Dialogue intended to model upstream Online Deliberation for agencies.No user participation in design.Administration had been in place for >4 months.

Move from top down agency action to bottom up: Phase I: Brainstorming using Ideascale.comPhase II: Discussion using OSTP Blog and Phase III: Collaboration using a wiki through

MixedInk.com.

Phase I: Brainstorming Using Ideascale

Short lead time and notice. OSTP used conference calls to activate participation through NGO’s membership.

Registered users create account, log in, post ideas for making government transparent, participatory, or collaborative.

Other users could vote up or down and comment.

Earliest posts ended up with the most votes.

Phase I Brainstorming Results

National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) monitored (7 days)30,222 visits -- 20,830 unique visitors.Every state and territory as well as 123 countries. About 4,000 registered as users (19% of the

unique visitors)1,129 unique ideas2,176 comments46,469 votes.

Suggestions included better use of federal advisory committees, e-rulemaking, or Web 2.0.

Phase I Brainstorming Problems

‘Birthers’ flooded the site with comments regarding the President Obama’s birth certificate.Most other users felt were off-topic.

NAPA could not remove comments and put them in a ‘parking lot’ in Ideascale. Site did not let other users self-moderate by voting

ideas down to minimize or hide them.

First Amendment prohibits government from discriminating on the content of speech in a public forum.

Phase II: Blog DiscussionOSTP blog:http://blog.ostp.gov/category/opengov/

Voting mechanism for self-moderating. A majority of negative votes minimized an entry but left an active link.

Allowed participants to deepen the conversation by drafting longer suggestions and commenting directly on each other’s entries.

NAPA analysis of Phase I helped inform Phase II.

From June 3-21, 2009, attracted more than 1,000 comments in response to 16 topics.

OSTP continues to use its blog for other OG issues.

Phase II Blog ResultsInput from some blog entries are reflected in

final Open Government Directive issued in December 2009.

Self-moderating solved ‘birther’ issue.

Problems: Blog does not create reliable permanent record of dialogue. Links with analyses and reports are broken.Links to files of data from Dialogue are broken.

Much less participation.

Unclear connections between ideas in Phase I and task in Phase II.

Phase III: Wiki using Mixed Ink

Wiki tool to draft policy (http://mixedink.com/opengov/).

From June 22-July 6, 2009, 305 drafts by 375 authors, with 2,256 people voting.

Phase III Wiki Problems:Attracted fewest participants by far. Allowed participants to use each other’s language

out of context Could make original author a coauthor on new draft

without the original author’s express agreement. Tool was best suited to small groups who share a

common goal and know each other.

OG Directive and PlansOG Directive in December 2009: Agencies must

Publish high value gov’t datasetsPublish open gov’t webpageCreate open gov’t culture among leaders Incorporate transparency, participation, and

collaboration into ongoing workDevelop an Open Government Plan, andCreate an enabling policy framework for open

gov’t to realize the potential of new technologies and forms of communication.

Spring 2010: All agencies have published plans: http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/

OGD Critique: Public Input, not Deliberation

No data on representativeness of participantsLimited outreach, mostly to organized

stakeholdersShort time frame, one off process not embedded.More individuals in Phase I, but by Phase III few

mostly organized stakeholders

Tools used were unsuited to deliberationNo self-moderation in Phase I; risk of useless textNo briefing materials, nor setting expectations

regarding deliberationWiki did not require deliberation – institutionalized

unauthorized use of ideas and name.No incentives based on reputation-building.

Next StepsOG Directive focuses on online transparency and

input. Does not adequately cover face-to-face.

DIRECTIVE DOES NOT USE WORDS DELIBERATION OR DELIBERATIVE.

If only online input, then make better uses:Fung, Graham, and Weil (2007) advocate

“Collaborative Transparency” to enable users to shape content. E.g. SARS outbreak map.

Sirianni (2009): Public co-produces gov’t services.Noveck (2009): Peer-to-Patent, an online

community of volunteer experts helps gov’t evaluate the originality of patent applications.

More ResourcesComprehensive empirical analysis of OG

Dialogue:STEPHEN P. KONIECZKA, “Practicing a

Participatory Presidency? An Analysis of the Obama Administration’s Open Government Dialogue,” The International Journal of Public Participation Volume 4, Number 1 (January 2010)