Federal agencies recently released their Open Government Plans on how they will actively engage citizens in agency decision-making efforts.  None, that I’ve seen in what I’ve read so far, are taking advantage of a growing trend to use geographic information systems (GIS) to increase citizen engagement.

Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients debuted before an audience of federal managers yesterday at the Excellence in Government Conference 2009, recapping what he has seen and learned during his “listening tour” of the government in his first 100 days in office.

As one of his first acts in office, President Barack Obamaissued his Memorandum on Transparency directing the workof the federal government—and all its information—to bemore transparent. According to the memo, transparency promotesaccountability and provides information for citizensabout what their government is doing. It also calls for executivedepartments and agencies to harness new technologiesto put information about their operations and decisionsonline and readily available to the public.

The Obama Administration’s data.gov website now has 110,000 government data sets that you can access and download.  So what do you do with this stuff?  Well, Sunlight Labs, an open government advocacy group, is sponsoring a contest encouraging citizens (well, okay, data geeks) to come up with applications that use the data in interesting ways.

The 2008 Obama presidential campaign laid out a series of exciting ideas for the use of technology in government and proposed the creation of both a Chief Technology Officer and a cybersecurity czar.  This was accompanied by the campaign’s own successful use of technology.  During the Transition, the “Technology, Innovation, and Governme

The long-anticipated presidential directive on Transparency and Open Government was targeted by President Obama to be announced today – 120 days after he signed a memo directing the development of an Open Government Directive.  I always thought that was a bit ambitious, especially since the officials designated to lead the effort had not yet been appointed.  In fact, the head of that effort, chief technology officer

A couple weeks ago, I attended the Mercatus Center’s 10th annual ceremony releasing their assessment of how transparent agencies were in reporting their performance via their annually-required performance report under the Government Performance and Results Act. It made me think about how far the whole transparency movement has come.