White House Wants Ideas for Open Government Plan

If you want a more open government, now is the time to put your ideas where your mouth is.

The White House seeks ideas and feedback from the public, federal officials and other open government advocates as it develops a third Open Government National Action Plan to be released later this year.

The announcement came in a White House blog post authored June 4 by Corinna Zarek, senior adviser for open government at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The government’s first and second iterations of open government NAPs were released in 2011 and 2013, and as Zarek notes, those initiatives will be fully implemented by the end of 2015.

Given the object is a more open government, the process by which the White House will ideate for the third NAP is transparent and open, yet perhaps even more so than prior efforts.

NAP suggestions can be emailed (opengov@ostp.gov) or tweeted to @OpenGov. Users can also log into the collaborative, publicly available Hackpad platform to share their thoughts and ideas. That online collaboration will be managed by social and digital government guru Justin Herman of the General Services Administration.

The blog post makes clear that new suggestions regarding old commitments are sought as much as ideas for new initiatives. The only stipulations are that ideas are ambitious, relevant, specific and measurable, according to Zarek.

“You may wish to suggest expanded commitments on topic areas from the first two plans such as public participation, open data, records management, natural resource revenue transparency, the Freedom of Information Act, open innovation, or open educational resources, among others," Zarek wrote. "You may also wish to suggest entirely new initiatives -- and we hope you do!”