Open Government: "Strategies and Tactics from the Playbook"

A number of federal agencies are experimenting with fascinating approaches to online public engagement, even in the absence of specific guidance about how they should approach such online opportunities.

This was the theme I heard echoed throughout the interesting Open Government: "Strategies and Tactics from the Playbook" event I attended this past Monday in DC. It was organized by the team of Lucas Cioffi, Stephen Buckley, and Kaliya Hamlin.

They designed the event with the goal of sharing lessons from agencies that have some early experiences. The format was a series of short, five-minute, presentations, which I think worked well. Here are some insights I picked up:

Open Government Directive: Coming soon?
A large part of the motivation for the Playbook event was to get people engaged in discussing the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive, which is expected to address how agencies should proceed on open data approaches and on online public engagement. The Directive was going to be released in October, but is not yet out; nobody at the Playbook event had much to say about the Directive, which was unsatisfying. There's a ton of interest in these strategies - so it cannot come too soon!
News about the Directive: InformationWeek – Sept 9
 
EPA
Presented a nice paradigm for modeling/planning citizen engagement:
from outreach
to information exchange
to developing recommendations collaboratively
to agreements
to stakeholder action
 EPA has also apparently trained 60 people to be trainers in online collaboration. Impressive.
 
GSA
Some people asked questions about the role of GSA in establishing policy for federal agencies on open government issues. The answer given by one GSA staffer was, “no role.” That's too bad - given the part GSA has played in the past, e.g. in negotiating blanket agreements for the use of third party tools.
 Tobi Edler presented GSA’s three-stage view of how to conduct public engagement online, which includes:

• Virtual town squares, i.e. idea jams. The White House has experimented with these several times. These are “software driven”, providing people a way to present ideas, review, comment and rank them.
• Virtual front porch: providing people ways to find and engage online with other people in their town/neighborhood, and then to take it offline to actually have in-person meetings.
• Electronic Petitions: to allow people to voice views on specific issues.

NIH Clinical Center
NIH has had some great experience with its "Drug Fact Chat Day," an annual day for teens to chat online with NIH experts. NIH provides this as a means for teens to obtain credible information from a trusted third party - and NIH gets some great intelligence about what is on the minds of teens (e.g., in 2009, there were twice as many questions related to marijuana as there were in 2008).
 
Drinking from the Firehose?
I heard genuine concerns from some federal staff (e.g., Forest Service) about the risk of being swamped by public input/comments online if they were to make rulemakings or decision-making proceedings more open for participation. Their concerns apparently stem from the obligation on agencies under the Administrative Procedures Act to catalog and reply to each individual comment (but is that not what the tool at Regulation.gov can help them with?).
I see opportunities for federal agencies to avoid injury from "drinking from the firehose" of public input online by defining differing levels of obligation for different levels of engagement...so they might indeed need to catalog and respond to comments in a rulemaking, but if they ask for more open-ended input about general policy issues, that should be valuable input which does not trigger response obligations.
 
Maxine Teller
Maxine had some pragmatic suggestions from her work at DOD for agencies wanting to experiment and explore social media. She suggested that they need to accept that (a) they do need some policy/guidance to manage it, and (b) developing some new policy/guidance for social media is not impossible – it can be done!
 
Centers for Disease Control
Someone from CDC presented the organization's “2x10 Principles of Consequential Public Engagement (CPE),” which is "public engagement carried out in mutual learning situations in accordance with principles designed to assure serious consideration for any recommendations produced.” See the white paper by Roger H Bernier of CDC on this.
I list their 10 rules here – even though they do not (all) apply to the many situations in which governments might want to provide opportunities for public engagement online: 

1. The desire for advice + the decision on the table are real.
2. Adequate time to deliberate + clarity of purpose are provided.
3. Both facts + values underlie the choices to be made.
4. Active agency staff + sufficient resources are committed to the process.
5. Both non-partisan citizens-at-large + partisan stakeholders participate.
6. A critical mass + diverse group of persons participate.
7. Unbiased information + neutral facilitation are provided.
8. Mutual learning through dialogue + thoughtful deliberation occur.
9. Difficult choices are made + agreed upon recommendations are produced.
10. The recommendations receive “serious consideration” + participants obtain candid feedback about the final decision made.

State Dept – Office of eDiplomacy
They are doing some great stuff, including experimenting with internal and inter-agency communities of interest on specific topics. The DipNotes blog is also a good and early example of government blogging. State has established what seem to be some reasonable, limited rules for online collaboration: "5 FAM 777 ONLINE COLLABORATION" (download as PDF.)
 
TSA
I like the tag line for theTSA blog - "Terrorists Evolve. Threats Evolve. Security Must Stay Ahead. You Play A Part." It is an active blog, with (moderated) comments, and they are using it in valuable ways. Just a few weeks ago there was a rumor circulating online that a woman (who is an active blogger) had been separated from her young child while going through TSA security. TSA reviewed their video of the station in question and saw that the claim was false, and jumped quickly to put the video online and to blog and tweet up a storm about the video. TSA got some 15k views of the video on CCTV, and, as of today, more than 120k of the clips up on YouTube. TSA feels they were able to nip this issue in the bud before it could cause a PR problem for them.
 
More about the Playbook Event
See Twitter on
 
#opengovpb
 
The organizers plan to host such sessions every six to eight weeks - and will provide more info here.