With so much focus on information-based transparency, Sunshine Week is a reminder that many forms of public access to government information are good for democracy.

Data.gov, the public catalog of diverse, high value, machine readable US government datasets is perhaps the best current example of information-based transparency. Recovery.gov has a similar transparency goal, but a different approach. It focuses on one topic, accounting for $787 billion in stimulus funding, by presenting summary level analysis of thousands of quarterly reports from the organizations that received funding.
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“Government is in danger of becoming irrelevant.”

That is one of the key conclusions of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government on which I serve. Agree or disagree, one thing is clear: Government has to change to keep pace with the 21st Century.
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Summary:
The heavy focus in the Open Government community on just “getting the data” has obscured some of the downstream requirements that are necessary to achieve the goals of OpenGov initiatives. Sometimes it seems there’s a perception that just exposing the data is enough – and there’s an expectation that useful applications will start to “magically” appear.

In order for Open Government initiatives to produce results that will truly affect political and cultural change, we need rich, usable, and USEFUL solutions that will add real value to citizens and agencies… and that doesn’t happen by accident or merely through community enthusiasm.
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