Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice

In a world where web services can make real-time data accessible to anyone, how can the government leverage this openness to improve its operations and increase citizen participation and awareness? Through a collection of essays and case studies, leading visionaries and practitioners both inside and outside of government share their ideas on how to achieve and direct this emerging world of online collaboration, transparency, and participation.

Contributions and topics include:

• Beth Simone Noveck, U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer for open government, "The Single Point of Failure"
• Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, "All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Liberating Government Data"
• Aaron Swartz, cofounder of reddit.com, OpenLibrary.org, and BoldProgressives.org, "When Is Transparency Useful?"
• Ellen S. Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, "Disrupting Washington's Golden Rule"
• Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org, "By the People"
• Douglas Schuler, president of the Public Sphere Project, "Online Deliberation and Civic Intelligence"
• Howard Dierking, program manager on Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet Web platform team, "Engineering Good Government"
• Matthew Burton, Web entrepreneur and former intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, "A Peace Corps for Programmers"
• Gary D. Bass and Sean Moulton, OMB Watch, "Bringing the Web 2.0 Revolution to Government"
• Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, "Defining Government 2.0: Lessons Learned from the Success of Computer Platforms"

Open Government editors:

Daniel Lathrop is a former investigative projects reporter with the Seattle Post Intelligencer who's covered politics in Washington state, Iowa, Florida, and Washington D.C. He's a specialist in campaign finance and "computer-assisted reporting" — the practice of using data analysis to report the news.

Laurel Ruma is the Gov 2.0 Evangelist at O'Reilly Media. She is also co-chair for the Gov 2.0 Expo.

Politicians, professors, pundits, and programmers come together to provide a multi-faceted and nonpartisan account of the history and future of government as it becomes more transparent, collaborative, and participatory. A portion of the royalties will go to two non-profit organizations. The Obama presidential campaign was historic for many reasons, including it's unprecedented use of the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies. Transparency and open government are two primary issues of this administration and we see technology playing an integral part in it, especially with the appointment of the country's first-very CIO and CTO. Topics include: government as a platform, the argument for open source software, transparency, citizen journalism, visualizing political controversies, security and transparency, digital divide, history of the online gov't, and campaigning.

Daniel Lathrop is a former investigative projects reporter with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He has covered politics in Washington state, Iowa, Florida and Washington D.C. He was a senior researcher on the New York Times bestselling "The Buying of the President 2004" by Charles Lewis. He is a specialist in campaign finance and "computer assisted reporting," the practice of using data analysis to report the news. He writes code in Perl, Python and PHP. He was the primary architect of the data for the Center for Public Integrity's successful Lobbywatch project, which provided the first truly searchable online database of federal lobbying available to the general public. He supervised the data team that developed CPI's Power Trips investigation of Congressional junkets.

Laurel Ruma is the Gov 2.0 Evangelist at O'Reilly Media. She is the co-chair for the Gov 2.0 Expo. Laurel joined the company in 2005 after being an editor at various IT research/consulting firms in the Boston area. Laurel went to Union College and is a photographer and homebrewer.