Public sector organizationsacross the country are
facing declining revenues, an aging workforce, and
citizens who demand better and faster services. A
typical response to these challenges would be to re-duce government workforces and cut services, but
there are reasons to hope that the often-stated but
rarely realized promise of “doing more with less”
may soon become a reality for many government
organizations.
On January 21, 2011, President Obama issued a
memo declaring transparency, collaboration, and
participation as among his most important values.
He asked agencies to pursue these goals with the use
of “innovative tools, methods, and systems” and
to “cooperate among themselves, across all levels
of government, and with nonprofit organizations,
businesses, and individuals in the private sector.”
Obama’s memo is part of a new movement for open
government or, as I refer to it, “Government 2.0.”
Just as the Web 2.0 shifted the traditional paradigm
of users as passive consumers of content to creators,
Government 2.0 will allow citizens opportunities to
participate and contribute value in a new architec-ture of openness and collaboration.
Transparency and Openness as a Foundation to a
New Civic Architecture
The traditional focus of open government advocates
has been on accountability. Very few would argue
with this principle, but the new open government
movement is likely to focus more on information
sharing that empowers citizens to be more actively
involved and creative. This shift from accountabil-ity to what I would call the generative power of
transparency reflects a new ethos. It recognizes that
the traditional (and often cumbersome) mechanisms
of public records requests can be improved on, so
government information is freely available for all
to use.
The potential of government data can be seen in
something as ordinary as weather forecasts. The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
began releasing weather-related information as early
as the 1970s, but now the data can be accessed in a
number of different ways, everything from the local
newspaper to the latest smart phone app. Global Po-sitioning System (GPS) data were originally reserved
for U.S. military use, but in 1983, President Ronald
Reagan ordered GPS data to be released to the Amer-ican public after 207 people were killed when a
Korean Air flight mistakenly flew into prohibited
Russia airspace and was shot down. As a result of
this directive, consumers now enjoy numerous ser-vices and products in their vehicles on smart phones
and elsewhere. It has also created a multibillion-dollar industry that employs tens of thousands of
people.
More recently, the federal government, led by White
House Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kun-dra, launched a central repository of freely available
data called Data.gov. While this is the most visible
example of open data, the real pioneer was the Dis-trict of Columbia. Under the leadership of Kundra,
who was then the chief technology officer for the
district, D.C. established a very sophisticated data
repository. From that effort, dozens of applications
were created to improve access to city services and
information.
Soon after the launch of Data.gov, Chris Vein, for-mer San Francisco CIO, and I began planning a sim-ilar effort. We started by learning as much as we
could from Washington, D.C.
Our goal was to create as much value in the shortest
amount of time with little or no capital costs. We
also recognized that our open data efforts would
evolve and that an iterative approach would serve
us best. In less than three months, we launched
San Francisco’s first data catalog, DataSF.org. In
the spirit of leanness, open source software laid the
foundation. A feedback mechanism allowed the city
to improve the quality of the data released and also
to prioritize what data sets should be shared.
For example, the public was the first to inform San Fran-cisco when street-sweeping schedule data was in-complete in many areas of the city. DataSF now hasfacing declining revenues, an aging workforce, and
citizens who demand better and faster services. A
typical response to these challenges would be to re-duce government workforces and cut services, but
there are reasons to hope that the often-stated but
rarely realized promise of “doing more with less”
may soon become a reality for many government
organizations.
On January 21, 2011, President Obama issued a
memo declaring transparency, collaboration, and
participation as among his most important values.
He asked agencies to pursue these goals with the use
of “innovative tools, methods, and systems” and
to “cooperate among themselves, across all levels
of government, and with nonprofit organizations,
businesses, and individuals in the private sector.”
Obama’s memo is part of a new movement for open
government or, as I refer to it, “Government 2.0.”
Just as the Web 2.0 shifted the traditional paradigm
of users as passive consumers of content to creators,
Government 2.0 will allow citizens opportunities to
participate and contribute value in a new architec-ture of openness and collaboration.
Transparency and Openness as a Foundation to a
New Civic Architecture
The traditional focus of open government advocates
has been on accountability. Very few would argue
with this principle, but the new open government
movement is likely to focus more on information
sharing that empowers citizens to be more actively
involved and creative. This shift from accountabil-ity to what I would call the generative power of
transparency reflects a new ethos. It recognizes that
the traditional (and often cumbersome) mechanisms
of public records requests can be improved on, so
government information is freely available for all
to use.
The potential of government data can be seen in
something as ordinary as weather forecasts. The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
began releasing weather-related information as early
as the 1970s, but now the data can be accessed in a
number of different ways, everything from the local
newspaper to the latest smart phone app. Global Po-sitioning System (GPS) data were originally reserved
for U.S. military use, but in 1983, President Ronald
Reagan ordered GPS data to be released to the Amer-ican public after 207 people were killed when a
Korean Air flight mistakenly flew into prohibited
Russia airspace and was shot down. As a result of
this directive, consumers now enjoy numerous ser-vices and products in their vehicles on smart phones
and elsewhere. It has also created a multibillion-dollar industry that employs tens of thousands of
people.
More recently, the federal government, led by White
House Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kun-dra, launched a central repository of freely available
data called Data.gov. While this is the most visible
example of open data, the real pioneer was the Dis-trict of Columbia. Under the leadership of Kundra,
who was then the chief technology officer for the
district, D.C. established a very sophisticated data
repository. From that effort, dozens of applications
were created to improve access to city services and
information.
Soon after the launch of Data.gov, Chris Vein, for-mer San Francisco CIO, and I began planning a sim-ilar effort. We started by learning as much as we
could from Washington, D.C.
Our goal was to create as much value in the shortest
amount of time with little or no capital costs. We
also recognized that our open data efforts would
evolve and that an iterative approach would serve
us best. In less than three months, we launched
San Francisco’s first data catalog, DataSF.org. In
the spirit of leanness, open source software laid the
foundation. A feedback mechanism allowed the city
to improve the quality of the data released and also
to prioritize what data sets should be shared.
nearly 200 data sets and over 60 applications that
have been developed using San Francisco data. The
applications have been produced at no cost to the
city’s government and are helping citizens under-stand when the next bus is arriving, analyze voting
patterns, and even report issues as they arise.
In the DataSF app showcase, public transportation
apps are by far the largest category, representing
nearly 20 percent of all apps. This is not surprising.
Public transportation is a quality-of-life issue that
affects most people in the Bay Area. One iPhone
app, Routesy, helps citizens navigate Bay Area trans-portation providers by using real-time prediction in-formation. By using a phone’s GPS location, they
can identify the nearest transit stops and determine
when the next bus or train is arriving. By releasing
these data, transportation providers are greatly im-proving customer satisfaction, increasing ridership,
and lowering costs. The app is rated very highly in
the Apple App Store; several customers have pro-vided comments, such as this one from “East Bay
MK”:
Thank god for Routesy!
It’s made my life so much easier. So much bet-ter than standing there at a bus stop wondering
when/if the bus is ever coming. And it works
way better than NextBus (which hardly works
at all). I feel like a public transit ninja!
Transit agencies are able to lower their costs by elim-inating the need for expensive electronic signage sys-tems and providing customers with alternative op-tions such as mobile apps, automated voice response
systems, and text messaging. Additionally, call vol-umes can be reduced through this approach in cities
such as San Francisco where 311 call center staff
respond to many calls for transit prediction.
With some applications, citizens actually can pro-vide information that helps local government, ei-ther by improving the quality of the data them-selves or by providing insight into areas that need
servicing. This approach has proven quite success-ful when local government is managing a large
number of assets spread across a sizable area,
such as trees. For instance, the Urban Forest Map
(www.urbanforestmap.org) is a Web site that allows
citizens to view San Francisco trees and how much
environmental value is being generated. The data
powering this site is from the City of San Francisco
and Friends of the Urban Forest, a local nonprofit.
The Web site also gives citizens opportunities to add
to or update existing information, which is then sent
back to the city. In this way, citizens are crowdsourc-ing a better understanding of their city’s urban for-est. The Urban Forest Map team has open-sourced
the code so other cities can benefit from its work.
Another example of citizens being able to push data
back to government is Open311 API. This interop-erable communication standard was launched with
Mayor Gavin Newsom and White House CIO Kun-dra in March 2010. It was heralded as a way for
cities to standardize how they publish information
and consume 311 data. Standardizing allows devel-opers to create applications that work in any city
that adopts the standard. Although standards may
seem trivial, they are a powerful way to enable in-novation. One just has to look at the Internet or
GPS as two powerful examples of standards cre-ating unforeseen value and innovation. As a result
of this collaborative effort among San Francisco,
other cities, citizens, and Open Plans, a national
nonprofit, Open311 is seeing tremendous growth in
adoption and applications. Large enterprise players,
such as the company Lagan, which sells the technol-ogy that powers many 311 call centers, have publicly
announced their support and will enable their cus-tomers to easily adopt this standard. The effort has
also led to the development of applications such as
the Open311, which allows Facebook users to sub-mit requests for city services where they find graffiti,
potholes, or overflowing garbage cans. Since these
requests are processed without the need for 311 cus-tomer service agents and routed directly the appro-priate servicing agency, there is a huge potential for
cities to save money and improve efficiency. One
can imagine new applications using text messaging,
Twitter, and even automated voice response systems
to allow citizens with numerous channels to inter-act with their city. “Government as a platform” is a
term used to describe this idea of creating an ecosys-tem of vendors, developers, and citizen hackers who
are solving many of the challenges in government.
The motivations for creating civic applications us-ing government data range from purely altruistic
to profit making. In some cases, vendors develop
new applications to sell to citizens or government.
In others, they may use new applications as way of
marketing their capabilities. Citizens themselves are
sometimes interested in solving a problem and giv-ing the resulting product or service back to their
community. For instance, some artists are using
data to explore and reinterpret urban spaces. In
the end, the open data approach recognizes that
government is simply a steward of public informa-tion with the responsibility to make this information
available freely. The potential benefits of increased
transparency, accountability, and the provision of
new government services are driving the adoption of
open data by local, state, and federal governments
across the world.
New Model for Government Innovation:
Collaboration
Many of us recognize the fact that government op-erations are more alike than not. Yet we continue to
create solutions in silos and make little effort to see
if there are opportunities to collaborate with oth-ers or even borrow solutions already in place. This
type of thinking may be overcome by recognizing
the simple fact that with the fiscal challenges facing
many organizations, we need to change how we do
business. Government leaders and taxpayers are de-manding that we work together to lower costs and
improve outcomes. We are now beginning to see a
new culture of sharing and collaboration that will
transform how government operates and ultimately
provide better services at a lower cost to our citizens.
In many ways, the tools and approaches for connect-ing with people and data are much more advanced
for consumers than for government. In our personal
lives, we manage friends and family networks by
Facebook; we use LinkedIn for professional rela-tionships, Wikis and Google Apps for collaborative
work, and Twitter for sharing news and status. Yet
in government, we still use tools and approaches
from decades ago. We cling to top-down commu-nication and organizational structures; e-mail for
communication; centralized Web masters for online
content. The world is moving toward peer-to-peer
communications facilitated by Web 2.0 technologies
and is seeing the benefits every day. The technology
is available to government organizations, but using
it will require creating a culture of sharing, openness,
and collaboration, which is even more challenging
than using new technology.
Govloop is an example of a large social network
for government employees. It is the largest social
network for government, with over 45,000 local,
state and federal employees. There are many uses for
Govloop, from building relationships, to answering
questions, to best practices. Government workers
can find out who is working on a specific topic and
pose questions and engage in dialogue. There are
nearly 1,000 groups within Govloop, and they range
from the esoteric to the mainstream. For example,
the National Institute of Standards and Technol-ogy (NIST) Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory
(MEL) Robotics connects researchers. Communica-tion Best Practices is a place to share publicly re-leasable guidelines, templates, and policies. While
many may question the value of Facebook in the
workplace, Govloop provides clear benefits to those
who use it for sharing and consuming knowledge.
In some cases, commercial self-interest can drive col-laboration among government organizations. One
such example is Google’s working with Portland’s
Trimet Transit agency to standardize transit infor-mation. As a result, the public can now use Google
Maps in hundreds of cities across the world to plan
their trip on public transportation. Before this col-laborative effort, public transit riders would have to
consult several maps and timetables, which discour-aged ridership. In 2005, Bibiana McHugh, an infor-mation technology manager at Portland’s TriMet
transit agency, and Google released Google TransitFormat Specification (now called General Transit
Format Specification, or GTFS). While adoption was
slow initially, the huge value that GTFS provides and
the Google brand name have helped push adoption
to hundreds of cities worldwide.
A great example of cities and counties working to-gether to develop a solution to common needs is
the Bay Area Recycling Database. The demand for
information on recycling hazardous and less com-mon materials is quite high, with over 3,000 peo-ple visiting San Francisco’s Ecofinder Web site and
over 5,000 downloads of its iPhone application.
Other Bay Area projects like StopWaste.org in
Alameda County have witnessed similar demand.
In an effort to reduce costs and standardize how re-cycling information and services are delivered, San
Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Jose
counties decided to work together to share the costs
($100,000), design the solution, and develop an op-erational and sustainable plan for joint efforts. Sev-eral challenges are being worked through, including
determining how to structure governance, procure-ment, and ongoing management.
With such compelling drivers of lower costs and
better outcomes, why is collaboration the excep-tion rather than the rule? Cultural attitudes are of-ten at the heart of the problem, but there is also
a greater cost to collaboration in terms of commu-nications, gaining consensus, and increased trans-parency and accountability. As mentioned before,
practical questions about procurement, governance,
and ongoing management arise when working in a
collective. Clearly, government needs a framework
and methodology for collaborative efforts. One such
model that has been closely examined is based on the
Kuali Foundation’s work in higher education. For
the past several years, the foundation has helped uni-versities collaborate on large-scale technology needs,
such as financial systems, with tremendous success.
In the government space, organizations such as Civic
Commons are becoming repositories of best prac-tices and actively exploring a model similar to that
of the Kuali Foundation.
While the costs of collaboration can be a barrier,
organizations that have pursued collaboration of-ten are rewarded with lower costs and better out-comes. In many instances, participating members
share costs equitably, saving substantial capital in-vestments. Technology can help lower these barriers,
but it is up to organizational leaders to encourage
their staffs to seek partnerships that will help drive
culture change.
Some of the best ideas often come from outside the
walls of government. This is an often-heard refrain
in the government 2.0 space. With Web 2.0 tools, the
public sector now has the ability to quickly and cost
effectively reach out to constituents for ideas, feed-back, and even policy making. “Ideation platforms”
that help people share and develop new ideas, such
as Ideascale and Google Moderator, are being used
by all levels of government. These tools have a sim-ilar construct that allows the public to submit ideas
and vote or comment on existing ideas.
In Manor, Texas, an experiment is being conducted
by which people can submit solutions on an open
innovation platform. Dustin Haisler, a former city
CIO, in partnership with Stanford University and
Spigit, an innovation management platform, de-signed a strategic process using gaming theory to
solicit and manage ideas. Each idea first enters the
incubation stage, where it is posted for the public
to comment and vote on. As the idea gains traction
through page views, comments, and votes, it may
move on to the next stage: validation. In this stage,
a department head reviews the solution in terms
of sustainability and cost to determine if the idea
should advance to the next stage, emergence. In this
stage, the city discusses the idea and how it might
be implemented. If the idea is deemed feasible, the
city will reward the initial submitter with a prize and
implement the idea. If the city does not advance the
idea, it responds publicly and gives its reasons for
not doing so.
In San Francisco, crowdsourcing is taking a differ-ent approach. The best ideas, as selected by the pub-lic, will be given seed funding through microgrants
and crowd funding. The Improve SF project, set to
launch in fall 2011, is a large-scale, high-profile, in-centivized experiment to empower the San Francisco
community by helping it generate and implement its
own solutions to its problems. In phase 1, commu-nity organizations will select three challenges fac-ing the city. In phase 2, the public will be asked
to submit innovative ideas that help address theseissues. In phase 3, the best ideas, as determined by
the public, will be seed funded through microgrants
and crowd funding. Self-identified solution support-ers will be matched with nonprofit organizations to
provide guidance and mentorship and to help mea-sure effectiveness. Phase 4 will consist of measuring
the effectiveness of the overall campaign, including
outcomes. While this effort is yet to begin, the idea
indicates the evolution and continuous experimen-tation taking place at many levels of government.
Conclusion
The examples discussed in this article represent only
a fraction of the tremendously innovative work that
is being done today in government organizations.
This flowering of innovation is being driven by sev-eral factors, including fiscal constraints, a new gener-ation of tech-savvy staff, Web 2.0, and an emerging
culture of sharing. Looking at innovation as a way
to lower costs is a strong argument for organizations
that have a more conservative culture. Many of the
examples described here have been conducted at no
cost and often generate tremendous value, quantita-tively and qualitatively, for the public.
When President Obama declared his commitment
to the values of transparency, collaboration, and
participation, he understood their transformative
power and the promise they hold of reimagining
government in our digital age. Each of us, whether
we work within the public sector or not, has the abil-ity to help advance these values through our support
and participation.
Jay Nath is director of innovation for the city and county of
San Francisco.
term used to describe this idea of creating an ecosys-tem of vendors, developers, and citizen hackers who
are solving many of the challenges in government.
The motivations for creating civic applications us-ing government data range from purely altruistic
to profit making. In some cases, vendors develop
new applications to sell to citizens or government.
In others, they may use new applications as way of
marketing their capabilities. Citizens themselves are
sometimes interested in solving a problem and giv-ing the resulting product or service back to their
community. For instance, some artists are using
data to explore and reinterpret urban spaces. In
the end, the open data approach recognizes that
government is simply a steward of public informa-tion with the responsibility to make this information
available freely. The potential benefits of increased
transparency, accountability, and the provision of
new government services are driving the adoption of
open data by local, state, and federal governments
across the world.
New Model for Government Innovation:
Collaboration
Many of us recognize the fact that government op-erations are more alike than not. Yet we continue to
create solutions in silos and make little effort to see
if there are opportunities to collaborate with oth-ers or even borrow solutions already in place. This
type of thinking may be overcome by recognizing
the simple fact that with the fiscal challenges facing
many organizations, we need to change how we do
business. Government leaders and taxpayers are de-manding that we work together to lower costs and
improve outcomes. We are now beginning to see a
new culture of sharing and collaboration that will
transform how government operates and ultimately
provide better services at a lower cost to our citizens.
In many ways, the tools and approaches for connect-ing with people and data are much more advanced
for consumers than for government. In our personal
lives, we manage friends and family networks by
Facebook; we use LinkedIn for professional rela-tionships, Wikis and Google Apps for collaborative
work, and Twitter for sharing news and status. Yet
in government, we still use tools and approaches
from decades ago. We cling to top-down commu-nication and organizational structures; e-mail for
communication; centralized Web masters for online
content. The world is moving toward peer-to-peer
communications facilitated by Web 2.0 technologies
and is seeing the benefits every day. The technology
is available to government organizations, but using
it will require creating a culture of sharing, openness,
and collaboration, which is even more challenging
than using new technology.
Govloop is an example of a large social network
for government employees. It is the largest social
network for government, with over 45,000 local,
state and federal employees. There are many uses for
Govloop, from building relationships, to answering
questions, to best practices. Government workers
can find out who is working on a specific topic and
pose questions and engage in dialogue. There are
nearly 1,000 groups within Govloop, and they range
from the esoteric to the mainstream. For example,
the National Institute of Standards and Technol-ogy (NIST) Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory
(MEL) Robotics connects researchers. Communica-tion Best Practices is a place to share publicly re-leasable guidelines, templates, and policies. While
many may question the value of Facebook in the
workplace, Govloop provides clear benefits to those
who use it for sharing and consuming knowledge.
In some cases, commercial self-interest can drive col-laboration among government organizations. One
such example is Google’s working with Portland’s
Trimet Transit agency to standardize transit infor-mation. As a result, the public can now use Google
Maps in hundreds of cities across the world to plan
their trip on public transportation. Before this col-laborative effort, public transit riders would have to
consult several maps and timetables, which discour-aged ridership. In 2005, Bibiana McHugh, an infor-mation technology manager at Portland’s TriMet
transit agency, and Google released Google TransitFormat Specification (now called General Transit
Format Specification, or GTFS). While adoption was
slow initially, the huge value that GTFS provides and
the Google brand name have helped push adoption
to hundreds of cities worldwide.
A great example of cities and counties working to-gether to develop a solution to common needs is
the Bay Area Recycling Database. The demand for
information on recycling hazardous and less com-mon materials is quite high, with over 3,000 peo-ple visiting San Francisco’s Ecofinder Web site and
over 5,000 downloads of its iPhone application.
Other Bay Area projects like StopWaste.org in
Alameda County have witnessed similar demand.
In an effort to reduce costs and standardize how re-cycling information and services are delivered, San
Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Jose
counties decided to work together to share the costs
($100,000), design the solution, and develop an op-erational and sustainable plan for joint efforts. Sev-eral challenges are being worked through, including
determining how to structure governance, procure-ment, and ongoing management.
With such compelling drivers of lower costs and
better outcomes, why is collaboration the excep-tion rather than the rule? Cultural attitudes are of-ten at the heart of the problem, but there is also
a greater cost to collaboration in terms of commu-nications, gaining consensus, and increased trans-parency and accountability. As mentioned before,
practical questions about procurement, governance,
and ongoing management arise when working in a
collective. Clearly, government needs a framework
and methodology for collaborative efforts. One such
model that has been closely examined is based on the
Kuali Foundation’s work in higher education. For
the past several years, the foundation has helped uni-versities collaborate on large-scale technology needs,
such as financial systems, with tremendous success.
In the government space, organizations such as Civic
Commons are becoming repositories of best prac-tices and actively exploring a model similar to that
of the Kuali Foundation.
While the costs of collaboration can be a barrier,
organizations that have pursued collaboration of-ten are rewarded with lower costs and better out-comes. In many instances, participating members
share costs equitably, saving substantial capital in-vestments. Technology can help lower these barriers,
but it is up to organizational leaders to encourage
their staffs to seek partnerships that will help drive
culture change.
Some of the best ideas often come from outside the
walls of government. This is an often-heard refrain
in the government 2.0 space. With Web 2.0 tools, the
public sector now has the ability to quickly and cost
effectively reach out to constituents for ideas, feed-back, and even policy making. “Ideation platforms”
that help people share and develop new ideas, such
as Ideascale and Google Moderator, are being used
by all levels of government. These tools have a sim-ilar construct that allows the public to submit ideas
and vote or comment on existing ideas.
In Manor, Texas, an experiment is being conducted
by which people can submit solutions on an open
innovation platform. Dustin Haisler, a former city
CIO, in partnership with Stanford University and
Spigit, an innovation management platform, de-signed a strategic process using gaming theory to
solicit and manage ideas. Each idea first enters the
incubation stage, where it is posted for the public
to comment and vote on. As the idea gains traction
through page views, comments, and votes, it may
move on to the next stage: validation. In this stage,
a department head reviews the solution in terms
of sustainability and cost to determine if the idea
should advance to the next stage, emergence. In this
stage, the city discusses the idea and how it might
be implemented. If the idea is deemed feasible, the
city will reward the initial submitter with a prize and
implement the idea. If the city does not advance the
idea, it responds publicly and gives its reasons for
not doing so.
In San Francisco, crowdsourcing is taking a differ-ent approach. The best ideas, as selected by the pub-lic, will be given seed funding through microgrants
and crowd funding. The Improve SF project, set to
launch in fall 2011, is a large-scale, high-profile, in-centivized experiment to empower the San Francisco
community by helping it generate and implement its
own solutions to its problems. In phase 1, commu-nity organizations will select three challenges fac-ing the city. In phase 2, the public will be asked
to submit innovative ideas that help address theseissues. In phase 3, the best ideas, as determined by
the public, will be seed funded through microgrants
and crowd funding. Self-identified solution support-ers will be matched with nonprofit organizations to
provide guidance and mentorship and to help mea-sure effectiveness. Phase 4 will consist of measuring
the effectiveness of the overall campaign, including
outcomes. While this effort is yet to begin, the idea
indicates the evolution and continuous experimen-tation taking place at many levels of government.
Conclusion
The examples discussed in this article represent only
a fraction of the tremendously innovative work that
is being done today in government organizations.
This flowering of innovation is being driven by sev-eral factors, including fiscal constraints, a new gener-ation of tech-savvy staff, Web 2.0, and an emerging
culture of sharing. Looking at innovation as a way
to lower costs is a strong argument for organizations
that have a more conservative culture. Many of the
examples described here have been conducted at no
cost and often generate tremendous value, quantita-tively and qualitatively, for the public.
When President Obama declared his commitment
to the values of transparency, collaboration, and
participation, he understood their transformative
power and the promise they hold of reimagining
government in our digital age. Each of us, whether
we work within the public sector or not, has the abil-ity to help advance these values through our support
and participation.
Jay Nath is director of innovation for the city and county of
San Francisco.
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