The Obama administration’s Open Government Initiative is now three years old. But is it making a difference?  Dr. Nabatchi’s report is a practical guide for program managers who want to assess whether their efforts to increase citizen participation in their programs are making a difference. She lays out evaluation steps for both the implementation and management of citizen participation initiatives, as well as how to assess the impact of a particular citizen participation initiative.

Fast-forward to 2012, where there’s an Administration promoting Open Government and citizen engagement via the internet and social media.  The old law, affectionately called FACA by government insiders, is still in force and increasingly irrelevant as agencies look for ways around its strictures to seek citizen and expert input.  But the original goals of the law are still very much a priority – to promote citizen participation and transparency, to ensure objectivity in advice to fe

President Obama created the Government Accountability and Transparency Board (GAT Board), headed by Earl Devaney, the chair of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (Recovery Board), to recommend ways to apply the successful lessons of how Recovery Act monies were overseen to all government spending.<

Federal agencies now use dashboards both for internal organizational management and to disseminate performance measures for transparency and accountability.

ARA funds were accompanied by a new, centralized system of strict financial accountability and performance reporting, with frequent reporting requirements. These new requirements, as well as the rapid implementation timeframe required by ARA, created an enormous implementation challenge for all the participants in our federal-state-local-nonprofit intergovernmental system.

Reverse Auctioning: Saving Money and Increasing Transparency by Professor David C.Wyld, is the latest report from the IBM Center. It is Professor Wyld’s second on the subject of reverse auctions.

Nancy Roberts, in a recent article for Public Administration Review, “Beyond Smokestacks and Silos,” explores “open-source, web-enabled coordination in organizations and networks.” She observes that there are different approaches used when the goal is to coordinate action within organizations vs. when the goal is to coordinate across networks.

Since creation of the IBM Center for The Business of Government more than 13 years ago, it has been our goal to help public sector executives and managers address real-world problems by supporting leading researchers who produce empirical evidence to inform the debates about whether particular management approaches will improve government performance.

These funds were accompanied by a new, centralized system of strict financial accountability and perfor­mance reporting, with frequent reporting requirements. These new requirements, as well as the rapid implementation time­frame required by the Recovery Act, created an enormous implementation challenge for all the participants in our federal-state-local-non­profit intergovernmental system.

The Bush website provided links to key management initiatives, such as the President’s Management Agenda Scorecard, a list and bios of top political appointees, and a set of agency examples of best practices. That site was called Results.gov.