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.

For example, Washington Post columnist Vivek Wadhwa’s article “The Death of Open Government” followed the resignation announcement of the federal government’s chief information officer – and Open Government champion -- Vivek Kundra.  But President Obama’s signature Open Government initiative does live.  It is just that there may be a shift in emphasis from a focus on transparency to a focus on citizen engagement.

It is tempting to think of the Open Government community as an undifferentiated body.  I know I did until I attended a meeting of Open Government advocates, at which O'Reilly Media Washington correspondent Alex Howard turned an analytical eye on us and theorized that we're actually composed of many different pieces that are each integral to open government. His observation was that there are many constituencies within the broader open government community that often are working on very different problems, or sometimes the same problem from different perspectives.

Government leaders are deluged with thousands of streams of data about the performance of their agencies and programs. One approach the Obama administration has latched onto to make sense out of the deluge of data is the use of on-line “dashboards” of performance data that track the key performance metrics of various federal agencies and programs.  The administration has touted the benefits of dashboards as a way of organizing and filtering performance data so it makes sense to decision makers so they can understand and act on it.

The Kettering Foundation has sponsored research on the concept of “accountability” over the past several years and has come out with two intriguing reports in recent weeks.  Both reports challenge the views held by most in government and politics.  This has significant implications for how public officials approach the issue of accountability, because the creation and maintenance of traditional accountability systems is costly and growing.  For example, r

Six weeks ago, President Obama signed an executive order, “Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service,” directing agencies to develop customer service plans by the end of October.  The Office of Management and Budget finally released its guidance to agencies on how to prepare those plans.

At first glance, these initiatives appear to cover divergent topics, with only technology as a common element. Upon closer review, the advantages that open government creates will only be sustained through appropriately secure and agile information flows within and outside government.

Complexity theory and complex adaptive systems are relatively new ventures in the field of public administration, but they are old hat in other academic disciplines such as physics and biology. So what did I learn?

President Obama’s February 2011 directive, “Administrative Flexibility, Lower Costs, and Better Results for State, Local, and Tribal Governments” instructed agencies to identify opportunities to streamline, reduce, or eliminate administrative requirements imposed on states and localities, and develop a plan of action in 180 days (August 26).  I summed it up in an earlier blog post.  OMB was to produce guidance t

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed the state of the art in developing and using comprehensive indicator systems in its 2004 report, “Informing Our Nation: Improving How to Understand and Assess the USA's Position and Progress.”  That report sparked an initiative by the National Academies of Science, with the support of several non-profit foundations, to explore the feasibility of developing a national indicator system.  This led to the creation of a non-profit, State of the