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absiebert

User Profile Image absiebert
Member since : May-29-2009 (Verified)
1 Ideas, 1 Comments, 31 Votes

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Ideas Posted

There are too many ideas here, too many redundancies, too many postings often irrelevant to establishing what the president is trying to do. Brainstorming is one thing, shotgunning is another. The further out the pellets go the further away from the target they get.

In order to help focus a little better, maybe NAPH should post openness/transparency success stories. What do we know about what works and what doesn't. Not that what has worked (and hasn't worked) in the past necessarily will work in the future, but at least it will give some useful 'fundamentals of implementation' to the thinking about that future. Cite by agency, DOD, NIH, NSA, WH, DOS, NSC, etc. Why did what they did that worked work. Why were there failures? Where did the public benefit the most and the least - how does one measure success?

This NAPH/Schmidt type of exercise generates many wonderful thoughtful ideas and clearly this technological methodology of scouring the country side for those ideas is extremely valuable, but my concern is that too much effort generating ideas and shifting them and playing with them technically could result in too much process and not enough implementation. And to those who think that we have to spend a lot of time on the front end, I suggest that after the WH establishes broad managerial and openness goals, you may find that we learn a lot more about how to proceed as new opportunities and obstacles reveal themselves) once the implementation ship is well launched than we do in the pre-implementation planning stages.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 4205 Ideas

Comments Posted

absiebert 9 months ago
Of course plans are a good idea, but my experience with openness initatives has been that while policy is important impolementation is crucial. (read Pressman and Wildavsky).

Getting openness to work is very hard even when there is strong pollitical support. Entrenched interests resist vigorously. But on the happy side nothing is more wonderful than a negative bureaucrat who wakes up and smells the roses and actually likes it .

Each agency needs a champion or champions who know the agencies very well, who can work up and down and across their agency and with other agencies and (heavy emphasis) the citizens, and who believe in their hearts that without tranparency and openness democracy is mortally wounded.

Then too there needs to be some way to call in the resources of the white house (financial, and muscle) if implementation problems are encountered. In past adminstrations I have not been impressed with the agency deputies types of meetings I went to and therefore do not think a panel of agency deputies would work. Too political; rather, perhaps a John Podesta WH type who did so well helping openness during the Clinton efforts.