We have excellent Open Government policies and declarations. However practical implementation of these collaborative principles have proven elusively difficult, with reported success stories coming from small or fringe initiatives rather than being systemic across government.
Why is that? Well, it’s complicated. There is a wealth of established wisdom spread across the domains of Open Source Software, Open Standards, Web 2.0, Open Data, Open Science, Open Education, Open Government, Gov 2.0, Management 2.0 and more. However, we still lack definitive guides which draws all this wisdom together into practical play-books which can be easily applied by government agencies. Instead, current government practices and guidelines regularly hinder collaboration. Let’s fix that. Let’s build an Open Government Playbook.
I’m disqualifying myself from applying for GovHack awards. GovHack is designed to develop applications from government data within a 48 hour period. I’ve been thinking about these Open Government concepts for many years, and have been working with Open Source, Open Standards and Open Data for decades. However I am very keen to develop these Open Government Playbook ideas further and would welcome discussions with agencies wishing to expand upon the idea.