As part of the Open Government Partnership, the US Government’s National Action Plan was released and the White House asked for input from the public on how citizen participation could be improved, facilitated, and measured. Here is OSFA’s response, which we submitted on January 3rd, 2012.

Open Source for America (OSFA) appreciates this opportunity to comment on the Open Government National Action Plan. OSFA was formed in 2009 to advocate for the use of open source software and the open source development process in the US Government. OSFA sees the Open Government Initiative as a unique opportunity to institutionalize the use of these tools to further to goals of transparency, collaboration, and participation &emdash; values which are inherent to the open source process itself. More information on OSFA can be found at http://www.opensourceforamerica.org.

Below, we focus our attention on one of the questions posed in the blog notice: What are the most effective forms of technology and web tools to encourage public participation, engage with the private sector/non-profit and academic communities, and provide the public with greater and more meaningful opportunities to influence agencies’ plans?

OSFA stands ready via its leadership and membership to work collaboratively to achieve the goals of the Action Plan and help identify Open Source tools that can assist in the work of the Action Plan.

Participation in Open Government Plans can take many forms, and be useful at different stages of the consultative process. This should be reflected in any system of measurement.

As a general matter, however, the forms of technology and web tools should be rooted in the open source development model and rely on open standards to encourage the widest participation and broadest utilization. In many respects, the work and progress of the Open Innovation agenda is relevant to achieving the goals of the National Action Plan.

This approach has a number of important collateral benefits for government: it encourages an on-going, cohesive community that wants to improve the technology and integrate user experience. It fosters a highly engaged constituency (vs a specific regimented approach) which becomes part of the process by developing new tools, modifying tools and the reuse of content and data which is produced through the consultation.

Based on our assessment of open government initiatives around the world to date, open government thrives where citizen interest is met with public sector support, and accelerates when open source innovation is a central core tenet of the policy. Open government initiatives and open source innovation share many core values , including: transparency , meritocracy of ideas , focus on the public interest. The tools generated from open innovation are also, based on our experience, highly available, affordable, and interoperable.

Too often, participation is narrowly understood as a written response to a government proposal. Instead, focus should be on encouraging participation through useful work by developing tools on a collaborative basis from relevant stakeholders which involve elements ranging from collecting and verifying data, bench marking its implementation, and the monitoring of its execution. This kind of participation is not well accounted for under the current consultative processes, which understand formal participation only as a persuasive document. Fortunately, we are no longer confined to the strictures of simply faxing in (or even mailing in) comments; the Web has allowed broader and more vigorous participation.

There are some useful examples that the Action Plan could draw upon. “Apps” contests, like Apps for Democracy and Apps for America, have been used largely as a tool for improving or supplementing the services delivered by government. We believe that there is also an opportunity to engage the software development community as policy is being developed, through contests and other means, to ensure their effective administration and help prevent unintended consequences.

Such tools would also increase the type and nature of feedback an agency might receive. We can imagine agencies being more than a convening body for input on the immediate matter, but a collection point for related data sets and tools that could improve the quality of the conversation more generally.

The challenge, in our view, is the ‘next step’ in realizing the full potential of Web participation. Having benefited from the enormous potential of the Internet, using open source tools and open standards, there is a need to focus on tools and processes that assist agencies in assessing the data and making actionable responses. As a step toward this end, the National Action Plan should include a recognition of this core element and seek community input on the state of such tools (including business analytic tools), and how they can be reused and broadly populated.