Why I’m looking forward to DC’s open government advisory group meeting on July 7

The next meeting of the DC government’s Open Government Advisory Group will be on July 7 at 4:00pm at the Shaw Library.

This will be the group’s second(-ish) meeting, and it will a crucial point for setting the direction and purpose of the group going forward.

Here are some reasons I’m looking forward to it.

• The group has the right people serving, with members of the public (8) and representatives of the Mayor (11), the Council (1), and independent agencies (3).
• The government staff who attended the first meeting were earnestly interested in openness and starting the group off right both in terms of form and function. For example:
• Our next meeting will be at a public library, with the hope that we may rotate through different locations throughout the District going forward. That idea came from Manya Shorr, the Director of Public Services of the District of Columbia Public Library, representing DCPL in the group.
• The mandate of the group is broadly to make the District government more open. #Opengov conversations all too often revolve around technology and open data. Our group appears ready to focus on people and the real problems residents are facing — as it should. Open data comprises just one-eighth of the group’s planned areas of work, which sounds about right to me.
• In addition to transparency and participation, the group will likely form a working group to improve the understandability of government information, maybe including civic literacy and data literacy. I’m excited to see the group focus on making transparency meaningful.

The meeting is open to the public and you should come.

History of the group

The Open Government Advisory Group arose in response to advocacy by the DC Open Government Coalition, Code for DC, and others in 2013, when the mayor asked for thoughts on an upcoming open government directive.

In Mayor’s Order 2014–170, the Transparency, Open Government and Open Data Directive issued July 21, 2014, Mayor Vincent Gray agreed to

convene an Open Government Advisory Group to be chaired and convened by the Mayor’s designee, CDO, and the Director of the Office of Open Government within the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability [to] Evaluate the District’s progress towards meeting the requirements of this Order and . . . Assist the Mayor and CDO in creating policy establishing specific criteria for agency identification of protected data in accordance with FOIA, maintenance of existing data, and the creation of data in open formats.

The group was officially formed by Mayor’s Order 2014–250 (Oct. 29, 2014) as an official DC advisory body to advise the mayor. The body, comprising 3 members of the public and 12 government staff, met twice before Gray left office at the end of that year.

Staff turnover under Gray’s successor, Mayor Bowser, left the body unable to meet for all of 2015.

It wasn’t until January 2016 that Bowser announced the group would meet again (which is when I was added to the roster), with then-Director of Technology Innovation Matt Bailey at the helm. But further staff changes left the group headless again. Six months later the group was re-established and expanded from 15 to 23 members (8 members of the public and 15 government staff; mayor’s order | MOTA live view). It met for the first time under Bowser on June 9, 2016.

(Mayor’s Order 2016–082 on May 25, 2016 created the position of Open
Government Officer within EOM, which, among other duties, provides staff support to the advisory group.)