IBM Center for The Business of Government

For years, democracy advocates have promoted the notion of engaging citizens in their government. There are different ways of doing this (public hearings, debates, dialogue panels, etc), and at different points in the policy cycle (proposing, debating, implementing, reviewing, etc.).

The media, and some members of Congress, continue to focus on President Obama’s use of “czars.” An article today by the Wall Street Journal’s Neil King examines how this dust-up highlights the ongoing challenge of how government is increasingly facing problems that reach across traditional agency and program boundaries. These problems include food safety, climate change, and the Recovery Act.

The Obama Administration’s data.gov website now has 110,000 government data sets that you can access and download. So what do you do with this stuff? Well, Sunlight Labs, an open government advocacy group, is sponsoring a contest encouraging citizens (well, okay, data geeks) to come up with applications that use the data in interesting ways.

A new study out by Brookings “Blogs as Public Forums for Agency Policymaking” looks at blogs created by top officials in five federal agencies and compared them to similar, but non-official blogs on the same topics to see how each are used to link citizens and government officials.