thinking

The Challenge: How should we define the meaning and goals of transparent data and transparent operations? How should government prioritize among different principles?

What We’ve Heard from You: During the Discussion Phase, many of you suggested potential principles that might guide the design and implementation of transparency in government, as well as ways of thinking about those principles. Now we would like you to describe concisely what that set of principles might be. Your draft could refer to a pre-existing collection of principles, e.g. the Open Government Data Principles.

Drafting Directions: Review the comments from the Discussion blog as well as comments made by government employees and review the submissions in From the Inbox. Incorporating earlier input, you may write your own draft, or combine and edit those of others to create a new one.

Writing policy requires translating good ideas into clear, specific directions for practical implementation. Hence a good recommendation will be no more than 4 sentences and a set of recommendations will be no more than 1 page. To be of maximum use, a recommendation should address:

- Who is being directed to do something? (e.g., "All agencies must...")
- What is the institution being directed to do?
- Why is it important that they do so?
- How will success be measured?

Note that per the terms of use, your drafts are expected to be (among other things) civil and on-topic. We are depending upon you, the community, to help maintain the quality of this process, by reporting drafts which appear to violate these terms. Once reported a sufficient number of times, drafts will be submitted for moderator review. They will then be republished in their original place, republished as an "off-topic" draft, or archived off-line if it can not be republished.

Return to Open Government Directive, Phase Three: Drafting, or to the OSTP Blog.

Collect and share valid information

If possible, allow others to independently validate the information shared

Explain reasoning and intent

Use specific examples and agree on important words
Open government should relate only to stakeholders, and not the wider population that exists outside of citizen credentialing systems. An organization is overly transparent when it does not allocate data rights to stakeholders for wider disemination, but instead supercedes stakeholder rights and openly disseminates data of value to non-stakeholders for use and data-value harvesting.

Inherent in transparency should be the realization that citizen status conveys values that non-citizen status does not have access to. So equally important to transparency is the opaqueness of data to non-stakeholders.

We should embed rights of use to citizens to extend empowerments afforded by transparent data, and provide opportunities for stakeholders to access and develop data resources within context of wider world.

Ownership of citizen data rights is the beginning of data transparency. Owners must be accountable for the data they possess as a function of participation in a democracy owned by its stakeholders.

Data transparency begins by defining a citizen owner identification system that is usable across all data stores, and for accessing all data assets held by the government that citizen owners create and possess as a matter of law. Citizen ownership supercedes all other government policy as defined by the opening statement of the COnstitution. "We the people..." are the owners and creators of all that proceeds from our integrated lives on this planet, and our government is a creation of "We the people...".
Challenge item 1)

The Meaning of Transparency as a quality of policy:

I. for the Executive Branch -

A. Daily Operation and Procedures must start with a business plan and ends with an audit at all levels

1) Each agency, department or branch creates a business plan for approval

a. includes situation; mission/task/activities; non-human resources; human resources or command and control, staffing or contractors; logistics, control, communication, schedules, deliverables, product, services, and cost

a. modification of plan would be clearly announced

2) annual reports of success would provide a self audit based on the plan.

a. success is measured per deliverable, product, or service

3) independent review or audit every other year depending on priority.

B. Spirit of Execution

1) Capital or Natural Resources can be either inventoried annually, or supported by a maintenance plan and condition inspections.

2) Operational budgets must be itemized by inter-agency and by special task force.. if the mission is distinct from the parent agency.

3) Plans must include budget and support for meeting transparency policy

C. Communication about the Plan and Success

1) Transparency is a quality, just as distortion and opacity, allowing someone to see and comprehend the measure of success of the organization.

2) Technology can help government communicate the measure of our success, however, a good plan and self evaluation is a property of Transparency.

II. for Government Data Sharing or "Rights of Access" would be covered well by the following discussed items or bodies of principles:

a) Adopt the eight Open Government Data Principles...

b) Adopt the Carter Center Plan of Action...

III. for the judiciary branch -

a) no change

IV. for congress -

a) Bills should be "open" to any citizen

Challenge Item 2)

Priority should be given to the government agencies given the largest budgets.
Governmental Transparency should adopt as its central tenet the goal of actively providing information to its citizens rather than merely making information "available". This has begun to happen on the data.gov site, but this site requires a programmer to aggregate and display information from sets of data - which, as of now, is sparse and largely uninteresting to the general citizen.

The transparency initiative should be a journalistic effort on the part of the government to aggregate all the daily "news" for its citizens that is in the public domain and publish it (categorized by Agency and tagged with keywords) on a website that citizens can easily access, read and follow. By journalistic, I don't mean selectively publishing the information that someone in the government deems worthy or safe. Public domain information should be regarded as BELONGING TO THE PUBLIC and it should be served to the public in its entirety. Examples: Publish every matter that congress or the senate votes on and the vote tally - tagging each issue with keywords for searching. Publish every single matter the supreme court votes on. Publish the visitors to the whitehouse - and, in an effort to uphold privacy for the President, when there is a visitor that needs to remain anonymous, publish "Anonymous Visitor".

This type of transparency not only makes information available, but it makes it easy to access and will aid in keeping governmental agencies less secretive. It will also have the effects of educating the voting public about their government and provide them with a way to become interested in following politics - both of which will make their votes smarter and their representatives more accountable.

21st Century Right to Know Recommendations: Defining Transparency

An informed public is essential to democracy and can help create a more effective, accountable government. Transparency is a powerful tool to demonstrate to the public that the government is spending our money wisely, that politicians are not in the pocket of lobbyists and specials interest groups, that government is operating in an accountable manner, and that decisions are made to ensure the safety and protection of all Americans.

Effective transparency means that the public has access to timely, accurate information in usable formats. It also means such information is easily findable, thereby allowing the public to utilize commercial or government search engines to sift through mountains of material.