Transparency, Public Participation, Collaboration - How to Craft Your Agency�s Open Government Plan

Federal Computer Week, in partnership with Adobe, invites you to an executive breakfast “Transparency, Public Participation, Collaboration – How to Craft Your Agency’s Open Government Plan,” to be held February 18, 2010 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.  This educational breakfast for government professionals will bring together senior government officials, technology and open government leaders to discuss and debate the issues facing each agency as it moves to craft its open government plan.

In response to President Obama’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, the White House issued its Open Government Directive on December 8, 2009.  Within 120 days, every agency in the federal government must publish its individual Open Government Plan, outlining how it will meet the renewed transparency, public participation and collaboration mission of the federal government.  The directive includes detailed requirements, from the development of a public-facing website to an inventory of high-value information.  As agencies move to meet these requirements, they must seek the input of internal as well as external stakeholders, from policy, legal, and technology leaders to open government experts and the public at large. 

More than any memorandum in recent memory, the Open Government Directive encourages significant re-evaluation of agency management, technology methodologies and administrative policies, but it also leaves the decision-making authority to agency leadership.  Among the key questions it raises are – how can agencies prioritize and incentivize publishing datasets that will provide maximum benefit to a large community of stakeholders – then process, organize, structure, and present the data as reusable information.  The non-prescriptive nature of the Open Government Directive offers agencies numerous opportunities to make dissemination decisions unique to the datasets they chose to publish and how it is interpreted by the public.         

Attendees of the breakfast will learn: 

• How to craft an Open Government Plan that helps to consolidate agency processes and improve the public mission
• How your agency can respond in a very timely manner to meet the aggressive timelines of the Open Government Directive
• What ubiquitous technologies are available in the commercial sector that government can leverage to enable better information and data sharing
• How agencies can publish their information on public-facing dashboards
• How to share all-inclusively by addressing the need to make information accessible and readable by people as well as machine-readable for technology applications and mash-ups
• Best practices and examples of approaches to share information in open formats
• A holistic approach to managing privacy, security risks and authentication issues
• How does the Open Government Directive affect FOIA