Government transparency: six strategies for more open and participatory government

• Nicol Turner-Lee, Jon Gant
• Knight Commission

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02 March 2011Over the last several decades, local, state and federal government entities in the United States have steadily moved toward more openness and transparency. By definition, openness and transparency allow stakeholders to gather information that may be critical to their interests and offer channels of communication between stakeholders and elected officials. Aided by legislative mandates and public policy decisions, most government entities are now required to make a minimum amount of information available to citizens, operate in the “sunlight” and not behind closed doors, and actively engage citizens in the policy-making process.

These trends have been fundamentally enhanced by the emergence of an array of information and communication technologies (ICTs)—including broadband Internet access, smartphones, netbooks, and other devices capable of accessing data via the web—that make it much easier for citizens to access and consume government information. In addition, these tools are facilitating a revolution in how citizens interact with government generally and with government data specifically. As a growing number of entities and agencies at every level of government leverage the power and relative ubiquity of the Internet to engage citizens in a variety of functions, from informal rule-making proceedings to formal legislative initiatives, a number of innovative government entities are also tapping into the expertise and innovative spirit of the public by encouraging citizens to create new tools—many of which are enabled by broadband—that transform government data and information into practical tools for use by the general public.

On this point, the Knight Commission makes its Recommendation 4: “Require government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records, and make civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the productive public use of such data.”

This paper examines how and why government at every level, particularly at the local level, should embrace emerging ICT technologies and Web 2.0 and 3.0 tools (e.g., social media and collaboration) to enhance their openness and engage citizens more fully. This paper offers several implementation strategies for Recommendation 4 that focus on enhancing government expertise and transparency, educating citizens regarding the availability and utility of government information and e-government tools, expanding efforts to support greater adoption of broadband Internet access services and devices, and forging public-private-citizen partnerships in order to enhance open government solutions. The purpose of these strategies is to provide a framework for facilitating these objectives and placing government entities on the proper pathway toward the full realization of the benefits of information transparency.