[open-government] US Open Government Framework Research Project at Center for Technology in Government

Fri Aug 13 20:34:03 UTC 2010

See:
http://www.ctg.albany.edu/projects/gsa

Summary

This project supports the efforts of the US General Services
Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative
Technologies (GSA OCSIT) to expand the knowledge base related to
supporting citizen services. Focused on supporting GSA OSCIT’s new
initiatives in citizen services and open government, this project will
yield two deliverables: 1) a practical resource to assist GSA OCSIT in
their efforts to build out the thinking and strategies to support
citizen services, and 2) a full research proposal that lays out the
research questions surrounding emerging technologies, open government,
and citizen services.

The practical resource will be an Open Government Framework based on a
value driven approach to thinking about and acting on the principles
of open government: transparency, collaboration, and participation.
The Framework will provide a bridge between the concepts of open
government and the pressure to "just do it.” The framework will be a
tool for government managers to use in implementing their open
government directives; supporting them as they move from ideas to
action. The framework is grounded in a focus on public value creation
and provides a tool for agencies to place stakeholders and public
value creation in the center of their efforts. It will categorize and
describe the attributes, characteristics, enablers, barriers, and
potential assessment criteria for each of the open government
principles so that agencies can create a shared understanding of the
stakeholders served by each strategy and the potential impact of each.

The full research proposal will set forth a plan to tackle the most
challenging research questions and seek to develop new knowledge about
open government.

More:
http://www.ctg.albany.edu/projects/gsa?proj=gsa&sub=scope

Scope of Work

With the release of the White House Open Government Directive, there
is an emphasis on citizen engagement and participation initiatives
that offer new opportunities for expanded and enhanced customer
service. The open government imperatives engage citizens in new ways
and provide opportunity to create innovative collaboration models. As
such, agencies need new ways of thinking about their relationships
with citizens and with each other to realize the full customer service
potential. In order to do this, it is critical to first create a
shared understanding of transparency, collaboration, and
participation, and how various investments in open government related
initiatives serve diverse stakeholders so that new initiatives can be
designed, implemented, and evaluated.

The development of the Open Government Framework will follow four
high-level steps:

    * Preliminary framework development. Drawing on past work,
literature, examples of practice, and interviews with key open
government thought leaders, CTG team will develop the preliminary
framework.
    * Testing and refining the preliminary framework. CTG and GSA
OCSIT will work together to identify the key leaders in 6-8 federal
agencies to attend an expert workshop. The goal is to select several
people within each federal agency who are responsible for a range of
citizen services and open government functions. The workshop will
focus on testing the applicability and utility of the framework.
    * Open Government Framework and Final Report. Based on feedback
from the expert workshop and continued conversations, CTG will develop
a final report that lays out the framework and provides use cases to
support agency adoption.
    * Develop a large scale research proposal. Using insights gained
from this project, CTG and GSA OCSIT will develop a full research
proposal focused on an examination of the challenging questions
related to open government

Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
  Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org
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