Feds find it isn't easy being transparent

With more and more officials in Washington and elsewhere embracing openness and transparency, what are the challenges of integrating that way of doing business in the federal government?

A panel at the Adobe Government Assembly, co-sponsored by MeriTalk, explored just that subject in a keynote discussion entitled "Executive Perspectives on Open Government", held Wednesday at the Reagan International Trade Center in Washington.

Former Clinton White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers notes that this week marks the first anniversary of Barack Obama's historic election. During the campaign, she says, the President made transparency in his administration a top priority.

Myers notes that, from the perspective of one who has served in the White House, the Obama Administration needs to be careful what it wishes for... or what it promises.

One of the things he is being judged on is, is he making government more transparent? And the jury is out.

For example, he promised that he would put every bill he signed on the Internet 24 hours before he signed it. Not quite there yet.

They said they would be more transparent about who comes to the White House. We're not quite there yet.

The President said, "we're going to release the names of every person who comes to this building." They don't tell you what the meeting was about.

So, two things happen. What is William Ayres doing at the White House? Well, it's not that "William Ayres, the domestic terrorist" we learned about in the campaign. And now they have to explain that it's not that William Ayres.

At the same time, those people who are themselves, like George Soros, he is the boogie man of Glenn Beck and some people on the right. He is the center of all the conspiracy theorists. He's been to the White House three times, and you get all this blowback from all your efforts at transparency.

And, as my grandmother used to say, "no good deed goes unpunished," and that's frustrating.

Myers also notes that the media plays into this as well, being "the first to punish you for information that you release."

Over the last few months, the Department of Homeland Security has been engaged in a groundbreaking experiment in social collaboration in executing a first-ever agency-wide review of all of its activities. As has been reported on Federal News Radio, the DHS Quadrennial Review has been conducted almost exclusively online, using a series of wiki-like blogs in which members of the public, alongside key stakeholders, were asked to propose areas for the review, and then have registered users comment on what others have posted.

Alan Cohn is Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Strategic Plans, and is heading up the Quadrennial Review, and offered this perspective of what that process was like:

We confronted this question of, "is this something we should do? Should we have a discussion about our homeland security policy and strategy in public? Should we open that?" And that's a legimate question. But I think it's outweighed and balanced by the conception and the imperative that homeland security is a shared responsibility among our stakeholders and partners, and so we have to have this process.

Cohn also noted that he and his colleagues had to confront a certain cynicism from nearly all participants in the Quadrennial Review process, questions of whether this effort was a legitimate attempt to cast a wider net for feedback and ideas on homeland security.

Cohn says the public review phase of the DHS Quadrennial Review is now complete, and the final report is due at the end of December. But he also says they're still wondering what to do with the reams and reams of public comment from the review, much of which contains disparate nuggets of good ideas on homeland security from the citizens who participated.

Finally, there's Price Floyd, Principal Deputy Secretary of Public Affairs at the Pentagon, who finds himself in the position of trying to set an example for his bosses when it comes to collaborative media.

"When I do my Twitter site at DoD.gov, what I do is I often ask questions," he told the Adobe/Meritalk audience. "I rarely just push out information, or when I do, I'm asking for comments. The idea is I also want to be informed, and I actually hope I change what I'm doing because of it."

Floyd says that, as an example, he was recently surprised at comments to his tweets regarding the recent decision by the U.S. Marine Corps to block access to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter on its networks pending a top-level security and policy review. Floyd says he expected an overwhelmingly negative response to the news from his Twitter followers.

Instead, he says he was shocked to see that 30-40% of his followers felt that the Marines were doing the right thing, and that perhaps it was right for the Marines to restrict the use of Facebook and Twitter, especially for Marines in warfighting mode.

Floyd says he hopes to dissuade his Pentagon bosses from thinking of collaborative media as just another iteration of the blast fax or blast e-mail, in which officials merely promote their own issues. "That's not what it is. It's a two-way street," he said.

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