Ready for Open Government?

Launch Survey Results

One of President Obama's first acts when he entered the White House on Jan. 20 was to issue an open government memo. In it, Obama said he wanted agencies to "harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and make them readily available to the public." The idea: Government should be more transparent, work more with agency and business partners, and more actively seek the public's opinion about policies.

But the majority of federal managers aren't completely sold on the open government initiative, according to a survey of 271 federal managers conducted by the Government Business Council, a business arm of Government Executive, in October. For the most part, federal managers are enthused about making more data available to the public, but they also are mostly satisfied with the amount of interaction they now have with the public, which is not often, according to the survey.

Although the White House has yet to issue the directive outlining how agencies should make more data available and interact with citizens, federal managers are not confident in their agencies' abilities to share information or seek public feedback. In fact, a majority of federal managers have yet to join social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

What does this mean for the future of Obama's open government initiative? We want to know what you, the managers who will be asked to create this new public space, think. To do so, Nextgov has teamed with the federal government social networking site Govloop to begin a conversation about the survey's findings. During December, Nextgov will post a portion of the results every week for three weeks. After viewing each week's results, we invite you to log on to Govloop to discuss with other feds what you think the results mean and what they portend for the open government initiative.

The first set of results deals with transparency and participation. On Dec. 9, Nextgov will post results on federal managers' views on collaboration. The third set, posted Dec. 16, will be on the primary obstacle managers say stands in the way of open government: cybersecurity issues.

Please take the time to look through the first set of results and follow the link to Govloop to discuss them with your colleagues. If you are not a member of Govloop, take a few minutes to sign up so you can take part in the conversation.

Launch Survey Results