Open Government

Chapter 9. “You Can Be the Eyes and Ears”: Barack Obama and the Wisdom of Crowds

Micah L. Sifry

On his first full day in office, President Barack Obama issued an executive memorandum that may someday be seen as signaling the most important shift in how government works in the United States since the rise of the New Deal. His subject? Not jobs or health care or the environment, but “transparency and open government.” In five succinct paragraphs, he promised to create an “unprecedented level of openness in Government” (see the Appendix A). “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration,” he wrote, arguing that it would “strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.”

Most significantly, he declared that in addition to making government more transparent, it should become more participatory and collaborative:

Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information…. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, ...