The Problems With Transparency Blogging

While reading the OECD article, Modernising Government: The Way Forward, with its recommendation for more “open government,” I wondered how President Obama’s efforts were going. Transparency has been a huge platform for his administration. Being on the President’s “Organizing for America” listserv, I receive all of the emails introducing websites like Recovery.gov, USAspending.gov, and the revamped Whitehouse.gov that highlight new measures his administration is taking to make government more accessible to the public. This week the FDA also introduced an initiative to make their agency more transparent.

It’s one thing to make public documents more easily available online – that’s a one-way transaction. But as the OECD article points out, open government also involves “enabling citizens to participate in decision making” (p. 3). The Obama Administration has answered this call by creating blogs aimed at engaging the public in dialogue about transparency (in addition to some face-to-face meetings). However, the young administration is finding that soliciting feedback through technology is a much more fraught project.

A Politico.com post by Josh Gerstein from June 4th noted two interesting issues that openness via blog technology brings to Obama’s efforts:

First, lots of people don’t know about blogging and do not feel comfortable using (or even have access to) the technology. In an example cited in Gerstein’s article, out of the 1.9 million federal workers asked to share their ideas about how to make their work more transparent back in February, only 91 comments appeared on a federal employee-only e-bulletin board. (And half of the posts were in response to others’ comments.) The new, tech-savvy White House staff overlooked procedures and cultural norms that would have made federal workers feel comfortable sharing their ideas.

Online dialogue, even on popular, more accessible sites, engages a self-selected population that tends to be middle class, younger professionals. In the federal workers bulletin board example, the responses they did receive were from IT professionals, not “rank and file” employees.

Second, it’s easy for an online conversation to get sidetracked or hijacked by individuals with passions about specific issues. A recent “brainstorming” discussion open to the public hosted by Whitehouse.gov, asked “How can we strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative?” In response, the blog was overtaken with comments on topics like the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship and marijuana legalization.

Beth Noveck, the initiative’s director, lamented, “The ideas that received the most organized support were not necessarily the most viable suggestions.”

The administration has good intentions. Further, this technological paradigm shift is in its infancy, so many of these issues are to be expected. The question is: Can the Obama Administration harness the technology in ways that will engage the broader public and actually move us towards a more modern and open system of government?

~ Nancy