The Open Government Challenge

Sometimes worlds collide and it is a good thing. Recently, my interest in enterprise collaboration has intersected with my engagement in local civic affairs and my exposure to the principles and practices of Open Government.

After several years of working at it, I have become quite proficient using social collaboration tools as integral part of how I do work - how I collaborate with colleagues and share knowledge in my professional life. So much so that I have come to take the use of social technologies for granted.

In my personal life I have been involved for the past two years in the successful efforts to reunite the two Princeton municipalities, The Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township. As of this past new year's day we are one community with one government. I was active in the grass roots effort to pass the consolidation ballot measure and then after the measure passed I was a resident volunteer on the information technology subcommittee of the Transition Task Force (TTF).

The TTF and its subcommittees were comprised of resident volunteers, elected officials, municipal administrators and their staff. The members of the TTF and the subcommittees collaborated to collect and analyze data, consider alternatives and make recommendations to the elected officials.

As I reflect on my experience on the TTF I must say that I believe that it was an excellent example of what I have come to understand to be the principles of Open Government. It was transparent, participatory, and collaborative. But the practices were not up to the Open Government standards. We did not utilize social technologies, such as a collaboration platform or a collaborative document management capability to collaborate. We were very reliant on face-to-face meetings.  Multiple versions of working documents had to be manually combined and reconciled.

We were committed to transparency and openness, all of the meetings notices were published in advance and the meetings were open to public attendance. However as a group we lacked the requisite knowledge and experience to employ social technologies effectively in practice. Despite the fact that all of the volunteers were highly skilled in their areas of expertise, we did not have a critical mass of savvy social technology users. Part of the challenge was also due to the time constraints imposed on the effort by the aggressive timeline from public approval to required transition implementation. There simply was not enough time to educate the group and establish these capabilities upfront in the process.

As I go forward I intend to expand my interest in enterprise collaboration to include the growing Open Government movement. I hope to put these principles into practice in my community. How about you?