On Tuesday, the Federal CTO, Aneesh Chopra and CIO Vivek Kundra announced the open government initiative directive. The directive has 4 steps: Publish Government Information Online, Improve the quality of government information, create and institutionalize a culture of open government, and create an enabling policy framework for open government.

CTO Chopra and CIO Kundra Launch Open Government Plan

Today at Acquia we are kicking off a webinar series to address the Open Government Directive. Our first Acquia Webinar today is: The Open Government Directive and Open Source Social Publishing. We will be joined by the NY State Senate CIO, Andrew Hoppin about his movement to implement transparency, participation, efficiency, and collaboration at the state level. If you would like to learn more please register for the webinar and participate in our Q&A session. This will be an ongoing webinar series for all the agencies looking to comply with the various steps of the directive.

Open government is a bold initiative for the US federal government. It is built on an effective model of openness and collaboration best implemented by open source communities like the Drupal community. The Drupal community has a long history of stepping forward to help new users succeed when their organizations need to get websites up quickly. In that spirit, we'll review what hundreds of US government agencies and departments need to get done in 45, 60, and 120 days as part of this directive and how using Drupal can help them succeed in implementing this directive.

1. Publish Government Information Online

Each agency has three major deliverables in the next 60 days. First, they must release 3 new data sets. Drupal supports open data formats and integrates well with existing systems to release data. It's also got strong integration with visualization tools like flash and flex via the services module. To see an example of a Drupal site which exposes data sets, see the Federal IT Dashboard. The most interesting part of this step is the requirements for feedback. Drupal excels at social publishing which allow users to engage with a website using social techniques. While the directive doesn't specify exactly how the agencies or departments should solicit feedback, it does imply that further directives are pending. Agency and Department leaders would do well to select a platform which supports a wide variety of social publishing including: blogging, wikis, commenting, forums, social networks, mash-ups, aggregation, profiles, micro-blogging, and voting. In the Drupal community we've learned that website users want to interact socially in many different ways and it's important to have a flexible platform to meet these evolving needs.

2.Improve the quality of government information

In the next 45 days, hundreds of US Federal agencies and departments will appoint a senior official to be accountable for federal spending information. These newly appointed senior officials will be responding to new requirements from the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget regarding controls over information quality and methods for quarterly reporting. These senior officials would do well to select a powerful and flexible platform that allow for feedback and quality control over their data. Drupal modules like the migrate and backup module suite can be useful for iterating over data until it can be exposed through a Drupal site.

3. Create and institutionalize a culture of open government

Each agency will be releasing an open government plan on both their new webpage or website, agency.gov/open as well have that plan appear on the whitehouse.gov/open dashboard. The plan requires the dissemination of a large amount of data, opportunities for feedback on the plan, requirements that the data be exposed in an open format, as well as integration of press conferences on the Internet. A good example of online press conferences can be done with Drupal is http://whitehouse.gov/live. These agency or department leads should look at the innovations gallery to see an example of how US AID solicited input from citizens, social entrepreneurs, and people in developing countries. The Development 2.0 Challenge is a Drupal site.

4. Create an enabling policy framework for open government

This step calls for agencies and departments to keep up to speed with the latest social publishing techniques to realize the potential for open government. Members of the Drupal community have learned that it's very hard to keep up with the absolute latest trends as a small or even large organization. We've learned that if you pick the right platform for innovation, and a community that has a track record for innovative execution it can be as easy as downloading and installing the latest feature to keep up with new social publishing features.

We know that the path to open government will be a long journey with many challenges beyond just picking a website technology. But the Drupal community offers more than just free and open source software, it also offers industry specific solutions, and examples of successful implementations with complex integrations that are specific to the open government directive. To learn more about how Drupal is being used to accomplish the open government initiative directive plan see:

1. Drupal transparency site: USA IT Spending
2. Drupal Participation site: Whitehouse Open for Questions
3. Drupal Collaboration site: Global Development Commons

You can also register to attend our first Webinar on the open government directive and open source social publishing today. Register now. Look for more webinars from Acquia addressing the open government directive at acquia.com.