Building Open Government
Author: Patrice McDermott

This article was published in Government Information Quarterly, Volume 27, McDermott, P., Building Open Government, pages 401-413, Copyright Elsevier (2010).

This paper provides an overview of governmental openness initiatives in the United States of America. It looks at laws and regulations underpinning Open Government, such as the Open Government Directive, the E-Government Act and the Freedom of Information Act. A key conclusion is that many opportunities exist for real change in how the federal executive branch works with the public. Many government agencies have embraced openness and are figuring out how to integrate and sustain it as part of their missions and strategies. The open government developments (also see videos 1.1-1.3) should be seen within the broader trends towards more openness. Yet, there is still much to do and governmental openness initiatives will require continued attention and oversight.

Note that this paper focuses mainly on the situation in the United States, and in many other countries the situation may be different. We will also be exploring differences among open government cases in this course.

This paper may help you grasp some key aspects of Open Government, such as transparency, participation and Freedom of Information.

Information strategies for Open Governments: Challenges and prospects for deriving pubblic value grom government transparency
Authors: Sharon S. Dawes, Natalie Helbig

This paper from Dawes and Helbig (2010) can also be helpfull. It argues that information-based strategies can be used to promote Open Government. Such strategies offer opportunities to create social and economic value, especially through the public use of government data and information. At the same time, government data has been criticized for its basic usability, weak application of stewardship principles, lack of data feedback and improvement mechanisms, and inadequate metadata. In this paper, the authors describe a case study and provide practical recommendations for information-based Open Government strategies.