Beth Noveck, former White House deputy chief technology officer and director of the Open Government Initiative, says the administration is on-track in its efforts to re-brand âopen government,â as âgood government.
Blogging on The Huffington Post, Noveck, the author of Wiki Government, a tome on social media and democracy, says the name change helps to explain what open-gov goals have always been about.
âThe Open Government Directive [was] never exclusively about making transparent information about the workings of government,â she writes. âIt was a strategy for changing how government works — using public sector information to create more innovative institutions and effective democracy.â
In late March, the administration announced the roll out of its âGood Governmentâ portal on the White House website, which folds traditional open-gov data into other useful information and tools.
In her blog post, Noveck offered support for the revamp of the open-gov brand.
âPutting the cabinet secretary’s schedule up online does little to produce greater accountability or better government,â she wrote. âAt least there’s no empirical evidence to suggest that it does. By contrast, when HHS makes hundreds of datasets about health and wellness available online and invites .orgs and .coms to transform that data into tools that help individuals, institutions and communities make smarter decisions that improve the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare, it is partnering with the public to solve problems more collaboratively.â