On his first full day in office, President Barack Obama issued an executive memorandum that may someday be seen as signaling the most important shift in how government works in the United States since the rise of the New Deal. His subject? Not jobs or health care or the environment, but “transparency and open government.” In five succinct paragraphs, he promised to create an “unprecedented level of openness in Government” (see the Appendix A). “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration,” he wrote, arguing that it would “strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.”
Most significantly, he declared that in addition to making government more transparent, it should become more participatory and collaborative:
Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information…. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.
Obama’s language was dry, but the message is clear: in essence, he is pointing toward a third way between the stale left-right dichotomy of “big government” versus “smaller government.” Effective government, Obama is suggesting, may be found by opening the bureaucracy to direct public monitoring, engagement, and, where viable, collaboration. Is Obama calling for the federal government to embrace the wisdom of crowds? The signs certainly abound.
The most robust moves came early, undertaken by Obama’s transition team during the weeks after the election but before his inauguration, when his team’s use of the Web wasn’t yet fully constrained by government traditions and legal hurdles. A number of valuable experiments came in quick succession.
First, on Change.gov, the official transition website, visitors were invited to “Join the Discussion” on topics such as health care reform, the economy, and community service, and rate the comments made by others. Several thousand people participated.
Then the transition team launched “Open for Discussion,” a gigantic online forum where people were invited to post questions and to vote the best ones up.[134] Over the course of two rounds, more than 120,000 people voted nearly 6 million times on more than 85,000 questions. In both cases, top administration officials offered answers to a handful of the top-voted issues.
Finally, there was the “Citizens’ Briefing Book,” an attempt at making sure that at least some iconoclastic ideas from the public made their way, unfiltered, directly into the president’s hands. More than 125,000 people voted on more than 44,000 submissions, and several months later, the White House Office of Public Engagement released a 32-page PDF along with a video showing Obama holding the report.[135]