Democracy 2.0 in the US

Democracy 2.0: A Case Study in Open Government from across the pond.

I have just listened to a presentation by David Ferriero – 10th Archivist of the US at the National Archives and Records Administration (www.archives.gov). He was talking about democracy, about being open and participatory. He contrasted the very early days of American independence, where there was a high level of secrecy in Government, to the current climate, where those who make decisions are not isolated from the citizens, and citizens’ voices can be heard. He referred to this as ‘Democracy 2.0.’ Barack Obama set out his open government directive right from the off, promoting the principles of more transparecy, participation and collaboration. Ferriero talked about seeking to inform, educate and maybe even entertain citizens.

The backbone of open government must be good record keeping. Records document individual rights and entitlements, record actions of government and who is responsible and accountable. They give us the history of the national experience. Only 2-3 percent of records created in conducting the public’s business are considered to be of permanent value and therefore kept in the US archives (still, obviously, a mind-bogglingly huge amount of stuff).

Ferriero emphasised the need to ensure that Federal records of historical value are in good order. But there are still too many records are at risk of damange or loss. A recent review of record keeping in Federal Agencies showed that 4 out of 5 agencies are at high or moderate risk of improper destruction of records. Cost effective IT solutions are required to address this, and NARA is looking to lead in this area. An electronic records archive (ERA) is being build in partnership with the private sector to hold all the Federal Government’s electronic records, and Ferriero sees this as the priority and the most important challenge for the National Archives. He felt that new kinds of records create new challenges, that is, records created as result of social media, and an ERA needs to be able to take care of these types of records.

Change in processes and change in culture is required to meet the new online landscape. The whole commerce of information has changed permanently and we need to be good stewards of the new dynamic. There needs to be better engagement with employees and with the public. NARA are looking to improve their online capabilities to improve the delivery of records. They are developing their catalogue into a social catalogue that allows users to contribute and using Web 2.0 tools to allow greater communication between staff. They are also going beyond their own website to reach users where they are, using YouTube, Twitter, blogs, etc. They intend to develop comprehensive social media strategy (which will be well worth reading if it does emerge).

The US Government are publishing high value datasets on data.gov and Ferriero said that they are eager to see the response to this, in terms of the innovative use of data. They are searching for ways to step of digitisation – looking at what to prioritise and how to accomplish the most with least cost. They want to provide open government leadership to Federal Agencies, for example, mediating in disputes relating to FoI. There are around 2,000 different security classification guides in the government, which makes record processing very comlex. There is a big backlog of documents waiting to be declassified, some pertaining to World War Two, the Koeran War and the Vietnam War, so they will be of great interest to researchers.

Ferriero also talked about the challenge of making the distiction between business records and personal records. He felt that the personal has to be there, within the archive, to help future researchers recreate the full picture of events.

There is still a problem with Government Agencies all doing their own thing. The Chief Information officers of all agencies have a Council (the CIO Council). The records managers have the Records Management Council. But it is a case of never the twain shall meet at the moment. Even within Agencies the two often have nothing to do with eachother….there are now plans to address this!

This was a presentation that ticked many of the boxes of concern – the importance of addressing electronic records, new media, bringing people together to create efficiencies and engaging the citizens. But then, of course,  it’s easy to do that in words….