Thank you, Chairman Murphy and members of the committee.
Thank you for the honour of appearing before you today to reflect on the meaning and value of open government and to share some of my insights and experiences in working to create an open government culture and practice.
I'm hoping to tell you for a few minutes about the White House open government initiative and what we did to begin the process of trying to create a culture of open government. I will then share ten principles for designing open government institutions, and conclude with a few thoughts about open data.
Let me at the outset make clear that the views I express are entirely my own, as an individual, and not those of my former employer, the United States government.
Let me start by laying out why I think open government matters. Open government goes far beyond transparency, which sometimes people confuse because of the term “open”. Opening up how institutions work first and foremost enables greater collaboration, what we might think of as open innovation. It affords the opportunity to use network technology to discover creative solutions to challenges that a handful of people sitting in Washington or Ottawa cannot necessarily devise by themselves. Washington government doesn't have all the answers. And in the network age, 21st-century institutions are not bigger or smaller institutions—they are smarter ones that can leverage the somewhat anarchic technologies, the kinds of social media we've heard about today, within tightly controlled bureaucracies to connect the organization to a network of people in order to devise new approaches that would never come from the bureaucracy itself.
When we can use new technology to build those kinds of connections between institutions and networks, we can come up with new and manageable and useful ways for government and citizens to solve problems together. I start from the assumption that everyone is an expert in something, and that many people would be willing to give of their time and participate if they had the opportunity to bring their skills and talents and enthusiasm to bear for the public good.
As President Obama recently said, “We cannot win the future with a government of the past”. The real motivator, I believe, for changing how government works, for moving towards open government, is to make government more democratic. Providing opportunities for citizens to collaborate is vital to fostering an engaged citizenry. Particularly in an era when the journalism industry is in economic transition, we have to look to new strategies that leverage technology to create democratic accountability and make citizens the co-creators and partners in governance with the public sector.
On his first full day in office, the President signed the memorandum on transparency and open government, in which he called for “unprecedented openness in government” and creating institutions governed by the three values of transparency, participation, and collaboration.
We started this White House open government initiative as a collaboration between the White House and all the agencies, including the National Archives and the Department of Justice, from whom you've heard today, and coordinated by White House counsel, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy in an effort to implement this memorandum on transparency and open government.
Two years later, every cabinet department and major agency in the United States has a brainstorming website for getting good ideas from the public and from employees. They can visit the General Services Administration’s apps.gov platform to get access to new social media tools, also for free. The White House alone has eight Twitter accounts, and we started from scratch with an open government account that now has—I'm pleased to report—150,000-plus followers. And many cabinet secretaries, as well as their departments, tweet.
Every institution now has a fully articulated open government plan, of the kind you heard the archivist describe, that lays out concrete steps for making this culture change real in practice.
We have a national data portal, Data.gov, where the U.S. government has put up hundreds of thousands of data sets. In addition, many agencies are developing their own inventories, searchable through Data.gov, where they're putting up further data. They're using new platforms like Challenge.gov, the new national website offering rewards for the development of creative solutions to problems.
In its first two years, the United States experience has been that of trying some new initiatives, experimenting with collaboration in day-to-day governance. You heard already about the citizen archivist program. When the Department of Health and Human Services wanted to help policy-makers and citizens make more informed decisions about their health care, it made hundreds of public health indicators available online—so-called community health data—and then invited people to create useful tools and visualizations with those data. In the first three months of that initiative, people outside government developed two dozen innovations to improve community health. And since that time they have developed many, many more.
I had the personal experience, working with my students at New York Law School, of collaborating with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to build the nation's first expert networking system that allowed volunteer scientists and technologists to work with the patent office to get better information for informing the decisions of the patent office.
This notion of open government, transparency, participation, and collaboration is by no means a U.S. mantra alone. Ten countries now have national data portals. The British Parliament is currently debating amending the Freedom of Information Act to provide for provisioning data in raw, downloadable formats for citizen reuse. Poland and Brazil are considering open access legislation. Ten Downing Street, like the White House, provides spending data and contracting data online. The Australian government has the Government 2.0 taskforce, which is exploring opportunities for citizen engagement. This is very much an initiative that runs all across the world as well as from federal to state to local levels in the United States.
The way we undertook beginning the process of creating an open and collaborative culture in the United States really required a combination of three things: policy, platforms, and projects. We started, of course, with significant policy initiatives on day one, setting out the ideals of openness and collaboration, to inspire the kind of change you've heard about today. We created new platforms, such as Data.gov and Challenge.gov, to translate policy into practice in concrete ways. Then we encouraged the launch of a multiplicity of projects to really let 1,000 flowers bloom and spawn innovation all across the public sector so that open government would be the work of thousands of people, not just a few people in the White House.
Let me add one note on the role and value of high-value data in this process. The open government directive very specifically provides for an inventory, via agencies, of high-value data. This goes beyond what we might think of as traditional accountability data, like spending data or the schedules of cabinet secretaries. It actually focuses on the data people want and are requesting, whether through the Freedom of Information Act or other open government processes, and ensures that open government actually serves the needs of the public.
Starting with high-value data allowed us to steer clear of national security data or personally identifiable private information. It allowed us to really focus on what we could do in terms of releasing and publishing data about public safety or patent filings so that we could create widespread culture change quickly.
High-value data, most importantly, puts the emphasis on information that improves people’s daily lives, not just the government's. There's a wealth of government data out there that can translate into useful knowledge that empowers people and policy-makers.
Finally, publishing high-value data allows government and the public to start developing a collaborative relationship, a productive relationship--the kind of partnership I referred to before--which allows people to make good and productive uses of that data in partnership with one another to the end of not just helping government but of creating jobs and generating economic value.
Let me conclude with ten quick principles for achieving open government in practice. I list these in greater detail in the written testimony you have before you.
How do we get from here to there?
First, we have to be open. Governments should do all of their work in the open. Contracts, grants, legislation, regulation, and policy should all be transparent, because by being open we give people the information they need about how their democracy works so that they can participate.
Second, open government includes open access. Work created by and at the behest of government and of the taxpayer, whether through grants or contracts, should be freely available. If taxpayers pay once, they shouldn't have to pay twice.
Third, we should make open government productive and not adversarial. Create that collaborative nature of the relationship by giving people the information they want.
Fourth, be collaborative. It's not enough to be transparent. Officials actually have to take the next step. They have to not just put out data but have to solicit people to use that data.
Number five is data, data, data. Love data and more data. The more data we put out, the better we can design policies, informed by real-time data, that generate value for both the government and the private sector.
Sixth, be nimble. Where possible, invite people to innovate in short time spans—90 days or less. Forcing people to act quickly discourages bureaucracy and encourages innovation.
Number seven is do more and spend less. By being open and engaged, we can design solutions that allow us to do more with less. Instead of just cutting a service to save money, we can come up with creative solutions, often using technology that helps us to save money.
Number eight is invest in platforms of the kind we've discussed, like data.gov, like the foia.gov that we've heard about.
Number nine is invest in people. To change the culture of government, we can't simply do it through policy. We have to do it by empowering the people to actually do the work of being innovative.
Lastly, we should design for democracy. By that, I mean we should always ask if legislation is enabling active and constructive engagement that is using people's abilities and enthusiasm for the public good. We can't simply sort of throw social media at a problem; we actually have to create processes for manageable and meaningful participation from both officials and the public.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and the committee. I look forward to answering your questions.