Example Policy/Principle Statements?

Jennifer Bell is the Executive Director of Visible Government.  Check out their mission:

VisibleGovernment.ca is dedicated to promoting online tools for government transparency in Canada.  VisibleGovernment.ca will champion the development of open source tools that allow citizens to share, organize, and analyze government data.  By promoting the creation of these tools, VisibleGovernment.ca seeks to increase government accountability and engage citizens in the democratic process.  The ultimate goal of VisibleGovernment.ca is to make Canada the world model for open governance.

The concept for VisibleGovernment.ca was inspired by the paper ‘Hack, Mash, and Peer: Crowd-sourcing Government Transparency ’ , by Jerry Brito of George Mason University, and by the example of the Sunlight Foundation in the US.

With her permission, her recent post to the ChangeCamp group is a guest post here.  Thanks Jennifer!  Jennifer’s cooperation here is a good example of how we would like to encourage non-partisan input.

Great thoughts & links on example policy & principal statement …

1.  Really, my favorite, in terms of clarity and concision, are the
Open Transition principles that Mark Kuznicki already mentioned:

http://open-government.us/

2.  OpenGovData principles are a comprehensive defition of what open
government data means:

http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/OpenDataPrinciples

3.  The reccomendations from the US group OMBWatch's report: 'Moving
Towards a 21st Century Right to Know Agenda' (the result of a long and
well-funded research effort spanning a multitude of stakeholder groups
and expert panels) has some good stuff in it, but it's a bit long and
unevenly applicable.  My favorite ideas are the creation of an 'Office
of Open Government', and reccomendation D-9, quoted at length below.

http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2008/11/17/the-right-to-know-agenda/

4.  While principles are nice, concrete examples of how a change will
improve society are powerful too.  The Illinois Data Exchange
initiative has put together some nice ones that support their
principles here:

http://www.chidataexchange.net/usage_examples.htm

5.  Norway's recent e-Citizen report, written by the 'Norweigen
Ministry of Government Administration and Reform' is fairly
revolutionary for something coming from a government agency, but it's
a report, not a policy statement.  Two key findings from the summary
are:

 - core aspecs of public sector data should be made accessable and re-
useable
 - e-government initiatives should participate with external
developers, both locally and internationally.

It's worth a look for a balanced section on positives and negatives of
public participation in section 9.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8694619/eCitizen20The-Ordinary-Citizen-as-a-Supplier-of-Publicsector-Information

(There are of course, other reports and reccomendations from different
agencies/countries, but the Norway one is the most recent.)

Jennifer

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 03rd, 2009 and is filed under examples, policy, transparency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.