The 20 Basics of Open Government

About The 20 Basics of Open Government: “The 20 Basics of Open Government was created with digital love and sweat by the Open Forum Foundation. We did this primarily because it didn’t exist, but really needed to. As we started looking around, we also realized that the terminology of open government is used by a lot of different people to mean a lot of different things. For example, there are multiple groupings of transparency advocates each with their own perspective, there’s the participation community, and then more generally there are techies and govies, each of which use different languages normally anyway.

Watching what is going on around the world in national, state, and local governments, we think opengov is maturing and that the time has come for a basics resource for newbies. Our goal was to include the full expanse of open government and show how it all ties together so that when you, the astute reader, meet up with one of the various opengov cliques that uses the terminology in a narrowly defined way, you can see how they fit into the bigger picture. You should also be able to determine how opengov can best be applied to benefit whatever you’re up to, while keeping in mind the need to provide both access for citizens to engage with government and access to information.
Have a read through it, and let us know what you think! When you find a typo – or something you disagree with – or something we missed, let us know that as well. The easiest way to do it is right there in the comments (we’re not afraid to be called out in public!), but we’re open to email and twitter as well. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think!.”