The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System

Everyone is talking a lot about open government and transparency these days. It's exhilarating stuff, and it's even more exciting to see governments get behind it, creating sites like data.gov in the U.S. for the public to access government information via APIs. But every time I hear someone say something like "our organization is really into transparency" (which is often) it sounds odd to me. It's only talking about a part of the puzzle, not the whole puzzle. What we really want (or what I really want anyway) is not simply government transparency, but an open civic system - a civic system that operates, and flourishes, as a fully open system, for whatever level we happen to be talking about - federal, state, city, neighborhood, whatever. And transparency is a big part of that open civic system, but it is still only one part. In fact there are four parts to a functioning open civic system. These are: More...

06-15-2009 14:38