Open Government Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice
* Book: Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma (eds.) – Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice
Review
Review by Adam Thierer:
"Open Government is a terrific collection of 34 essays covering the full gamut of transparency and “Government 2.0″ issues. The collection was published by O’Reilly Media and Tim O’Reilly himself has one of the best chapters in the book on “Government as a Platform.” “The magic of open data is that the same openness that enables transparency also enables innovation, as developers build applications that reuse government data in unexpected ways.” (p. 25) This explains why in their chapter on “Enabling Innovation for Civic Engagement,” David G. Robinson, Harlan Yu, and Edward W. Felten, of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, speak of “a new baseline assumption about the public response to government data: when government puts data online, someone, somewhere will do something valuable and innovative with it.” (p.84) “By publishing its data in a form that is free, open, and reusable,” they continue, “government will empower citizens to dream up and implement their own innovative ideas of how to best connect with their governments.” (p. 89) (http://techliberation.com/2010/12/10/the-10-most-important-info-tech-policy-books-of-2010/)