Today I participated in a panel discussion on the state of transparency in Illinois. Here’s the packet associated with the conference.
When we went around to throw out the problems that need solving, the one I focused on was the fact that there is little to no true collaboration among all parties. That is to say, if we consider the goal to be the provision of relevant, responsive, accurate information from government to the public, we have to consider the needs, fears, skills, and strengths of all parties to that transaction.
I got a lot out of this day and I think there was a real movement away from legislative and administrative solutions (FOIA law, Attorney General oversight, etc.) and into market and policy-oriented solutions (applications built on existing data, working with government to get value out of their own data, etc.)