order nexium online
September 24, 2010 by
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The second volume of the is now out, and free for all to read. The journal features articles about transparency and open government under three categories: invited papers, scientific research papers, and case studies.
I’ve written before about how . It’s still a happy surprise that it has gotten there so soon. The Journal of eDemocracy’s second issue of the second volume has a lot of internationally-focused, gov 2.0 issues, but there are articles relevant to state and local transparency.
For example, “” by Cyril Velikanov is about how communities can use mass online deliberation to resolve conflict. Governments can take a page from this sort of research to understand how they can incorporate online methods to interact with their citizens.
“” by Ben Li looks at the variable of making processes “e”–that is, electronic. He finds that whether or not something is “e” has little to do with whether it serves to promote democratic outcomes. This is also applicable to local governments: going online and embracing gov 2.0 isn’t all there is to open government.
I look forward to reading more issues of the Journal of eDemocracy. Let us know what articles you find useful.
order nexium online
March 5, 2010 by
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An interesting post in the site (“technology and the business of government”) posits that “the practice of disclosing government data in a way that is meaningful to the public and holds the government accountable could become a growing area of scholarly interest.” In other words, .
In particular, scholarly interest. The article notes that Obama’s transparency promises played a large role in making open government a priority by giving the idea a , even if his policies in effect have been worthy of . This increased attention on transparency makes it easier to obtain funding for projects related to releasing government data in a usable format.
The article also notes that the body of work on the subject of using data to drive transparency is limited. I recently wrote about how some people are incentivizing the development of programs that would .
The experts interviewed implied three things:
1) Transparency is complete. It means all of the related documents, all information.
2) Transparency comes with the responsibility of interpreting the data.
2a) There is a need for scholars’ perspectives:
“You might need legal experts to be able to explain how information fits into the statutory or regulatory framework; you would need cognitive specialists to talk about attentional issues, human-computer interaction specialists . . . and social scientists of some sort to do follow up.”
3) The collaboration between governments and citizens has to be real. (In fact, one scholar’s concern about Obama’s policies was the lack of genuine participation from citizens.)
The article continues to talk about the need and pursuit of funds for funding the academic study of government transparency. We, of course, are happy whenever any attention is paid to government transparency, from whatever angle. It tends to produce good outcomes. The scholarly angle in transparency can do nothing but add and improve to our current knowledge.