This meeting is relevant to the following initiative in the US National Action Plan:
1.1 Promote Public Participation in Government – specifically the first two bullet points, ie We The People
Attendees
Government Offices Represented
- Office of Science and Technology Policy
White House OGP Liaisons
- Lisa Ellman, OIRA
- Nick Frazier, OIRA
- Remington Greg, OSTP
Civil Society
- David Stern, AmericaSpeaks
- Phil Ashlock, Open Plans
- Anil Dash, Expert Labs (by phone)
- Wayne Moses Burke, Open Forum Foundation/OpenTheGovernment.org (by phone)
Discussion
Given that We The People has largely been a successful implementation of a petition platform, and that the civil society critiques of it are primarily focused on how to improve it (as opposed to its flaws), this was a very friendly meeting.
Civil society reported on the results of a UserVoice (citizen input) forum that they ran to gather feedback on how to improve We The People (http://wethepeople.uservoice.com/). The government officials responded, sometimes with acknowledgement of the issue, and sometimes with explanations of why they chose to implement what they did.
Many of the proposed improvements or evolutions of the We The People led to the government officials responding that this was part of what they hoped to accomplish through open sourcing, because of their internal resource constraints. Consequently, the civil society groups agreed to help support open sourcing of the platform in any way possible.
In addition, there was discussion of civil society helping to create a public feedback mechanism for ongoing improvement and discussion of the platform itself.
