On December 8, 2009, OMB released the Open Government Directive, which provided specific guidance on fulfilling the vision set forth by President Obama for open government. One of its requirements was for executive departments and agencies to create a public feedback mechanism to solicit citizen feedback during the development of each department's or agency's Open Government Plan. The majority of the executive department and agencies opted to meet this requirement through the implementation of an open government public web site built on the IdeaScale platform.
The web sites, which are now live, provide an important opportunity for citizens, including young professionals, to have their voice heard on open government. The public sites have already collected over 800 new ideas and public solicitation of ideas will continue at least through March 19, 2010.
Michael Walsh, the Executive Director of the OpenGov Diplomacy Group, already has contributed a number of ideas to the sites, including:Young Diplomat Program
Department of State
The Department of State should develop a Young Diplomats contest program for American students. The program would provide students with the opportunity to advance their understanding of the core topics and issues relevant to the foreign service (similar to the National Geographic Bee for geography). The program would run for the entire academic school year and rely on long-term engagement with students. The program would commence with a registration process which would provide students with access to an online community of practice. The community would provide age-appropriate resources for the students. The students then would prepare for the contest using a series of online practice modules and mobile phone based applications that would test the students on sample questions. The students then would complete an online competition that would serve as qualification for a local competition. The local competition would enable qualified students to compete with their peers in the classroom and be administered by a local school district. The competition then would progress through in-person competitions to the national competition. Advancing students would be provided a paid summer internship at the Department of State once they matriculate to college - thereby ensuring that the reward is linked to both their educational and professional development.
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Young Adult International Development Community
USAID
USAID should develop an online social networking community for young adults interested in international development. The community should enable students to engage in conversations related to functional areas (i.e. agriculture) as well as regions of interest. The community should be serviced by a few select USAID ambassadors, which may include acting foreign service officers, as well as USAID approved educators. These ambassadors and educators should be available for town hall meetings and podcasts and would be expected to contribute high-value resources to the student community (including multimedia). On a regular basis, USAID also should leverage the community to run contests where students can propose new ideas for complex international development problems, particularly those that require international aid organizations to engage directly with young adults. Awards should be provided to students in the form of publication of their ideas and USAID leadership recognition, perhaps on a senior leader's blog. If managed correctly, the community ultimately could serve as the main clearinghouse for USAID internships for high school and college students.
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Standing User Experience & Design Resources for Web Pilots
USAID
Federal web pilot projects (both internal and external) consistently are undermined by usability and design shortcomings. The reason for this is because few program managers have access to standing, cost-effective user experience and design resources within their organizations. They therefore need to contract out vendors who specialize in the practice. However, owing to their small budgets and the bureaucracy of federal contracting regulations (which further inflate acquisition costs), there are few web pilot projects that can justify the procurement of such specialized services. The net effect is that pilot projects launch with poor usability and design issues, which impair their performance and undermines the value of the entire experimentation process. In a Web 2.0 world where usability and design are so important, USAID program managers should have access to standing user experience and design resources within their organizations or have access to them at intragovernmental level. These resources should be equivalent in quality to industry leading commercial organizations and must be available in a cost effective hourly manner. This would enable web pilot projects to have access to the 15-60 hours of user experience and design resources they typically need to realize their potential on the web.
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Comprehensive USAID Foreign Assistance Data Set for Data.Gov
USAID
USAID should publish a machine readable high value data set on Data.Gov depicting all relevant data for USAID directed foreign assistance projects. The USAID directed foreign assistance data set should be broken down by recipient of aid, location aid is rendered (geocoded), category of aid (specifically: 1) countries recovering from disaster; 2) countries trying to escape poverty; 3) countries engaging in democratic reforms; 4) other), explicit field of aid (ex. public health, economic development, etc.), rendering agent (ex. named contractor), and duration of project (by month/day/year). It also would be valuable if the data was supported by high-level pre-project initiation KPIs and post-project KPI performance evaluation data. Finally, it would be nice if the data could be easily mapped to State Department data on entity in control of territory aid is rendered (ex. foreign government, non-state actor, etc.) throughout the duration of the project.
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Contact Infromation Directory for Int. Disaster Response
Department of State
In coordination with its global, regional, and local disaster response partners, the Department of State should maintain a standing directory of point of contact information for governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental organizations by country. In event of a crisis, the Department should publish this directory in a machine readable form. The Department also should present the directory on a rapidly deployed open web site for the crisis. The web site should present the Department's vetted information and make sure this information is clearly identifiable. In addition, the site should enable local stakeholders to upload their own information; enabling the directory to scale to meet the crisis.
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DoD Web Site Directory
Department of Defense
DoD should expand upon http://www.defense.gov/home/webwatch/ to include all official, beta, and pilot external web properties managed by the department. The directory should provide intuitive navigation and enable users to discover sites based upon both text-based and faceted search. Once the directory is completed, it should be expanded to include other departmental digital communication assets, such as public facing mobile web applications and social media accounts.
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International Disaster Community of Practice
Department of State
The Department of State should partner with other federal government(ex. DoD, USAID, USIP, etc.), intergovernmental (ex. UN), and non-governmental organizations to launch a community of practice for international disaster response. The community should enable peer-peer engagement between those most affected by international disasters, including political leaders, first responders, aid organization representatives, business interests, and civic leaders. The community should evolve into a repository of high-value resources (ex. best practices, educational material, etc.), as well as an open forum for ongoing discussion. The community should regularly highlight participation by those affected by past crises (ex. possibly mayor of Port-au-Prince).
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OpenGov Diplomacy
Department of State
The U.S. Government should invest significant resources to advance the concept of open diplomacy. This new construct would rely heavily upon the U.S. Government’s existing e-diplomacy and public diplomacy tradition. However, it would not be limited to these disciplines. Open diplomacy would serve as the overall diplomatic strategy for the country - placing new emphasis on: 1) increasing transparency, promoting openness, and valuing foreign citizen feedback in American foreign policy; 2) promoting the use of new and emerging technology and processes to bridge the cultural, political, scientific, and economic gap between the U.S. Government and the global community; 3) leveraging American citizens to increasingly engage foreigners as "ambassadors" of American values and ideas. Open diplomacy would not supplant the importance of elite engagement between professional diplomats. Instead, it would serve to rebalance relative importance of soft power and hard power objectives; recognizing the long-term strategic importance of confronting the rapid decline of American influence over global ideas and values.
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Innovative Web 2.0 Solutions
Department of State
The Department of State has a strong record of experimentation with Web 2.0 technologies. This includes creating a number of social networking sites (ex. Exchanges Connect and State Alumni Network), participating in virtual communities (ex. Second Life), and launching mobile applications (ex. Haiti widget). Of these various examples, the ones with the most impact are those that leverage public - private partnerships (ex. Google's contribution on the development of the Haiti widget). The Department should institutionalize these partnerships to a larger degree and better leverage private and academic partners to innovate new ways to connect with foreign citizens on issues such as culture and science. The Department also should take account of projects that have failed (ex. X-Life Games) and pool the funding of disparate efforts so that the Department can launch two to three big projects a year. Finally, the Department should use social media and crowdsourcing technology to solicit public feedback and new ideas from the target audience (ex. foreigners) for all big projects prior to their implementation to better determine the probability of success. This should be baked into a new agile procurement and development process which would enable the more rapid development of solutions.
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Public Social Media Platform for International Disaster Response
Department of State
The Department of State should fund/establish a social platform that enables real-time, two-way feedback between crisis victims and international disaster responders. The platform should integrate with existing social media platforms (ex. Twitter) and be mobile device enabled. The platform should be easily customized for any crisis and rapidly deployed following the on-start of the crisis.
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DoD Social Media Data Set
Department of Defense
DoD should publish a machine readable data set outlining the department's use of social media in external communications. The data set should include all public social media accounts used in direct or indirect engagement with the US public, who the account is associated with (ex. official department or sub-department account, official PR spokesman/woman account, or leadership figure's account used for official communications), a breakdown of accounts by platform (ex. YouTube, Ning, etc.), categorization of the type of social media platform (custom platform, licensed proprietary platform, third party platform), number of posts/updates per account over specific time series (ex. 44 tweets by Twitter Account A on 1/1/10), and average number of comments/replies for each post/comment.
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Cultural Community to Build Bridges between U.S. and Foreigners
Department of State
Description: The Department of State should expand on Exchanges Connect and develop an American culture site where our government presents American history and culture through a personal lens. The site would rely heavily on multimedia content and present American culture through the following global navigation elements: 1) People (stories of individual Americans); 2) Songs; 3) Movies; 4) Images. The site should be supported by rich media (ex. interactive timeline) and user profiles, enable submission of user-generated stories by individual Americans as well as polished stories on historical figures by government web managers, provide functionality for user content rating, sharing, and commenting, and be fully integrated with third party social media sites (ex. YouTube; Flickr). Target audience: The site should provide an opportunity for Americans of all demographics to participate in direct cultural exchange with foreigners. It therefore should be designed to support both an American and foreigner community. Objective: The site should enable two-way interaction between "American cultural ambassadors" (a cross-sectional group of Americans selected by the Department as particularly well-qualified experts on American culture) and foreigners interested in American culture. It should seek to build cultural bridges between our own citizens and foreigners at a personal level. Technical Consideration: The site should be built on a non-proprietary platform (ex. Open Source CMS) rather than Ning to address privacy concerns.
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Recovery.Gov Donation and Procurement Site for International Disaster Response
Department of State
In collaboration with governmental and nongovernmental partners (ex. American 501(c)3 nonprofits), the Department of State should develop an integrated "acquisition and procurement" platform for international disaster response. Modeled on Recovery.Gov, the platform should support the unique needs of the international disaster response community, especially financial and gift-in-kind donations (ex. materials or personnel) requested by nonprofit disaster response organizations. By doing so, the site will foster rapid collaboration between foundations, corporations, and private donors and the on-the-ground American disaster responders; thereby improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire international disaster response effort.
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