Agencies generally do not adequately plan for or budget to integrate public participation or collaborative processes into their programmatic work. To undertake small and large-scale public participation or collaborative efforts, agencies often have to re-program personnel and dollars or look to other program sources, effectively “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Additionally, many public participation and collaborative efforts are long-term in nature and annual budget cycles do not generally allow for budgeting for multi-year processes.
For public participation to be done well, adequate resources must be dedicated for this purpose. Funding is needed to support new uses of technology, education and skills training, travel, administrative support, and expert assistance such as facilitators.
By soliciting public input, the Open Government Directive promises to make government more efficient, reducing costs related to overlooked information or stakeholders, lengthy campaigns to educate the public after the fact, and concealed redundancies. Therefore, a significant initial investment, may promise to pay for itself over a period of years. OMB should work with the other task forces and oversight groups to determine this window of years and track the savings provided to the tax-paying public. This will also serve to provide greater incentive for Americans participate in open government, by providing high-level input.
Recommendations for action, developed in April 2009 by federal agency managers attending "Champions of Participation":
1. Direct agencies to incorporate participation and collaboration into funding requests and major project planning, such as: in the formulation and justification of budget requests funding; in the process of planning any large projects (such as planning processes, environmental studies, rulemakings) thereby building the public participation strategy into the life of the project;
2. Direct agencies to use at least 1% of program budgets for implementation of the directive and specify the resource needs to support public participation and collaboration including full-time positions for subject matter experts, basic education and skills training, technology tools to increase transparency, public participation and collaboration, and other capacity building needs.
3. Set standards for the amount of funding that will be dedicated to participation and collaboration activities, such as: study how participation and collaboration dollars are already being spent; provide resources and formulas that allow agencies to track savings and/or efficiency; use agency collected data to set standards.
4. Create new funding sources for participation and collaboration, such as: public-private partnerships, use attrition to shift more full-time positions to new positions that focus on using collaborative approaches and public participation strategies; develop a fund for the purpose of supporting public participation and collaboration across agencies.
Comments (10)
From my perspective as a public affairs officer in a federal agency, I think this idea hits the nail on the head. My experience is that communication activities have no appropriated funding streams, but ride instead on the backs of funded projects and programs like a suckerfish, usually to the extreme annoyance of most managers.
Transparency will not occur in the federal government until the public affairs officers and directors of communications sit at the management table with money in their pockets and a mandate that cannot be ignored.
Do we know how much is 1% of all agencies programs budgets?
The notion seems fine, but who is it that has oversight of all the additional 1% spend (within the actionable, agency tasks) you propose and what criteria is there for accountability of performance. Oh, and yeah there are additional, associated costs for all of that too above and beyond the 1% additional overall cost increase you proposed, however muich that really would be... And I voted for the President!
Oversight and accountability are critical pieces of the implementation of all these open government approaches. It's critical that public resources are wisely spent, and that goals are met.
The costs of these elements could be incorporated into the 1% or applied in another part of the budget. Either way, oversight and accountability must have adequate funding.
One of the goals of this effort should be to develop open source tools (web-based public participation tools, meeting management tools, etc.) to reduce the cost of implementing an effective public participation program.
This is exactly the approach that I have been advocating. Fully funding minority participation and collaborations with underserved, underrepresented communities is essential to mitigating some of the problems that we must all tackle together. If a significant representation of the population is not involved in cleaning-up the environment, they are automatically contributors and the government is throwing away good money after bad if they are not funding ways to capture these contributors/participants. An Office of Minority Civic Engagement with an appropriate budget that reaches all citizens does not seem to be too much to ask.
Dear fellow "Idea" brainstormers and commentors:
For news and moderated discussion (public, but unofficial) about the
continuing development and implementation of the "Open Government
Directive", you are invited to either:
1. send mailto:opengovernmentdirective+subscribe@googlegroups.com
2. visit http://groups.google.com/group/opengovernmentdirective
NOTE: Because I am posting this to the Comment section of some
(but not all) Ideas, you may see this message more than once.
I apologize for that.
vr,
Stephen Buckley
http://www.UStransparency.com
Q. Why wasn't the question answered 'why is this idea important?'
A. Because a thinly veiled funding drive to "direct agencies, set standards, create funding sources" and study spending, doesn't qualify as an OG idea
The idea is another government money pit, with the members lining their pockets and buying gold with OUR money.
http://CAFR1.com and http://TaxRetirement.com
ENLIGHTENING Action every Citizen can take!