Our understanding of open government and transparency is slowly becoming more sophisticated. And whoever learns first, will have an advantage, so take Ed Felten’s latest advice by heart: Outreach is not transparency.
Here’s the difference: outreach means government telling us what it wants us to hear; transparency means giving us the information that we, the citizens, want to get. An ideal government provides both outreach and transparency. Outreach lets officials share their knowledge about what is happening, and it lets them argue for particular policy choices — both of which are good. Transparency keeps government honest and responsive by helping us know what government is doing.
Twitter, with its one-way transmission of 140-character messages, may be useful for outreach, but it won’t give us transparency. So, Congressmembers: Thanks for Twittering, but please don’t forget about transparency.
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the danger within politics jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon is clearly that governments and politicians will use these tools to keep the citizens at bay. while we are busy watching Merkel’s video blog and reading Guembel’s tweets, we don’t ask questions at the same time. very convenient for the politicians and we’ll see more of that. bread and games 2.0