I also submitted a post under the Definition of Transparency topic where I touched on some of these ideas.

True Open Government (Government 2.0 as some of us in the tech industry have been calling it around the Internet) should not only "value" government transparency where the public is able to access government public domain information, but it should facilitate the public receiving this information. I'm calling for a Journalistic Arm of the Government (the acronym JAG is already taken! JARG works!...and it is also a convenient pun for "jargon").

JARG should be a public oversight committee or agency whose central task should be to provide information that is in the public domain to the public in easily accessible ways. By "Journalistic" I don't at all mean "selective". This agency should report ALL public domain data including detailed breakdowns of Senate and House bills, Supreme Court cases, FDA reports, EPA reports, etc. All this information is aggregated by the government, classified and tagged with the agency name and topic and posted to a website and other means of dissemination.

JARG should take care to be purely objective. There will always be the checks and balances of JARG information from private media across the United States, but this entity should only serve its mission of providing information deemed public to the public without any kind of filter.

Providing quality information to the public, in easily accessible ways, will create a public consciousness that is smarter about the issues, more informed about government processes, more informed about its representatives in government and more active politically. Ultimately it will create smarter votes and smarter candidates.

Well, I think you have built a culture around transparency.

I would first create and control an environment where open and transparent and communications are rewarded and secrecy is frowned upon. Define the meaning of transparency in the mission statement. The core values of each entity should create their own definition of professionalism with transparency within the definition for the organization. Reward employees when they communicate deficiencies. Re-assign managers and supervisors to accomplish the mission of transparency. No doubt, you will have to re-assign managers. Some managers have so many skeletons in their closet and just are not competently trained to be open and transparent. They need to be re-assigned because the inherent control risk will be too high with them at the helm. You will need to assess the risk of transparency in a culture. I think special internal control auditors would be required. You will need about 9 different auditors acting independently to come to their own independent fair and reasonable assessment on risk. It just like bidding out for a new piece of equipment - you want to go with the risk assessment that is most comfortable. Next, you will need to build a system of (not computer system) communication. You will need to share information with all people from low to high. Then, you will need to monitor the control environment, run annual or semi-annual audits of internal controls. Additionally, you need to have high retention of the trustworthy managers that are put in place.

I would be happy to answer any questions just email me.

O, yea you will need to get rid of NSPS pay system and many contractor positions. Why, opens and transparency often have conflicts the interest of people in power. The power of secrecy is easily enforced at Senior Management levels in the NSPS system and in private industry who are profession leverage artists. The GS pay system builds the absolute necessary security for openness and transparency to talk root and achieve success.

You will need to strengthen tenure for all people in the government. When the people have job security, can afford to take on more risk by being transparent.

The GS schedule was made with this specific purpose in mind. All People were supposed to receive raises on time intervals to remove much of the office politics that was formally use to obtain bounces. Bonus, need to be capped at 1% on the GS schedule.

You need to make sure the bonus are secure and predictable for an individual to willing to take on more risk by being open and transparent with discrepancies.

You need to allow the people to be independent, free, to pursuit happiness at their government jobs with respect to openness and transparency. The only way this will happen if they are being leveraged by management to not tell people what is going on behind closed doors.

I am tired and need to go. I went to woke up at 5:00 went to work at 6:00 and tomorrow I have to be get up at 4:45 to work

You need to allow the people to be independent, free, to pursuit happiness at their government jobs with respect to openness and transparency.

These problems with ARRA transparency measures stem not from technical challenges, but from a lack of real commitment to fully using the power of the Web. In February 2009, OMB released guidelines that pointed the way to a much more robust and meaningful form of transparency where all federal agencies participating in the ARRA would directly report to the public using feeds. Feeds published directly by the agencies managing recovery spending are well suited for transparency. They are a simple, yet powerful way of sharing machine readable data. Feeds can help make it easy for private citizens to develop their own applications and visualizations of Recovery related reporting data. Feeds can also be aggregated from multiple sources, enabling a site like Recovery.gov to offer a comprehensive overview of information collected from distributed sources.

In response to OMBs initial set of recommendations, my colleagues, Erik Wilde, Raymond Yee, and I drafted a report (http://repositories.cdlib.org/ischool/2009-029/) that further elaborated on the design of a feed-based reporting infrastructure. Our report was by no means the last word on the story, and I have had several conversations with various government officials that further developed OMBs original concept of feed-based reporting.

However, these plans have been scrapped in favor of a closed, highly centralized architecture that will limit the publics direct view of agency actions, and instead relegate public reporting to a secondary source, Recovery.gov. This firewall separating public disclosure and internal reporting will only serve to weaken trust and public accountability in the Recovery Act.

Bringing a new employee/contractor/intern into government should be a transparent, streamlined process. It should be like FedEx package tracking:

Here's the employee tracking number, here are the six steps, here's where your new employee's application is in the process, here's how long each step should take, here's the contact info for the person responsible for each step.

I've been trying to hire a summer intern for two months! The summer may be over by the time we get approval. I wouldn't want to work for such a doofus organization.