Not Quite a Blog

Here at Princeton's CITP, we have a healthy interest in issues of open government and government transparency. With the release last week of the Open Government Directive by the Obama Administration, our normally gloomy winter may prove to be considerably brighter.

In addition to creating crazy-cool tools like Recap and FedThread, we’ve also been thinking deeply about the nature of open and transparent government, how system designers and architects can better create transparent systems and how to achieve sustainability in open government. Related to these questions are those of the law.gov effort—providing open access to primary legal materials—and how to best facilitate the tinkerers who work on projects of open government.

These are deep issues, so we thought it best to organize a workshop and gather people from a variety of perspectives to dig in.

If you’re interested, come to our workshop next month! While we didn’t consciously plan it this way, the last day of this workshop corresponds to the first 45-day deadline under the OGD.

Open Government: Defining, Designing, and Sustaining Transparency

January 21–22, 2010
http://citp.princeton.edu/open-government-workshop/

Despite increasing interest in issues of open government and governmental transparency, the values of “openness” and “transparency” have been undertheorized. This workshop will bring together academics, government, advocates and tinkerers to examine a few critical issues in open and transparent government. How can we better conceptualize openness and transparency for government? Are there specific design and architectural needs and requirements placed upon systems by openness and transparency? How can openness and transparency best be sustained? How should we change the provision and access of primary legal materials? Finally, how do we best coordinate the supply of open government projects with the demand from tinkerers?

Anil Dash, Director of the AAAS’ new Expert Labs, will deliver the keynote. The list of speakers is impressive and practically guaranteed to catalyze deep thinking.

The workshop is free and open to the public, although we ask that you RSVP to citp@princeton.edu so that we be sure to have a name tag and lunch for you.