Today, 17 organizations — several of them coalitions —
wrote to
Cass Sunstein and
Aneesh Chopra to recommend a way to make the
Open Government Partnership (OGP) public consultations truly public: an open blog to which the interested public can submit their ideas, using the model developed by and successfully employed twice by the Public Interest Declassification Board (
PIDB). These consultations were done in public and online; the PIDB did not just take the comments privately via e-mail and summarize them online.
Last week, we wrote about what the
Roadmap for the
Open Government Partnership (OGP) lays out as the principles for public consultation — and noted what Aneesh Chopra and Cass Sunstein proposed as the 'next phase' of the US government's consultations: a blog post with questions and an invitation to " send your thoughts to
opengov@ostp.gov."
It was a proposition that we and others thought needed improvement to meet the spirit of the consultation process and make it in keeping with the President’s commitment to transparent government.
