Monday, May 24, 2010

OpenGovRadio 5/25/10: Talking with White House/OSTP's Eugene Huang

Here's what we'll discuss on this weeks's OpenGovRadio show (Tues., May 25th, 2:00 pm ET):

"Talking with White House/OSTP's Eugene Huang"

Your host on OpenGovRadio is Stephen Buckley, and his guest will be Eugene Huang, Senior Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).  We'll be talking with him about the White House's approach for implementing the Open Government Directive, both at OSTP and government-wide.

From August 2009 to April 2010, Mr. Huang served as the Government Operations Director for the National Broadband Task Force at the Federal Communications Commission, and was part of the team responsible for authoring “Connecting America: The National Broadband Plan”.

Mr. Huang served at the United States Department of the Treasury under two Secretaries of the Treasury from 2006 to 2009, as Policy Advisor to the Secretary and previously as a White House Fellow.  From 2002 to 2006, Mr. Huang served the Commonwealth of Virginia under Governor Mark R. Warner as the Secretary of Technology and previously as the Deputy Secretary of Technology. At the time of his appointment as Secretary of Technology in 2004, he was the youngest cabinet member in Virginia history at the age of 28.

In addition to listening to the show on your computer, you can add to the discussion with your comments and questions.  You can do that in either (or all) of three ways:

A.  Post a Comment/Question on this Blog at least one hour before the show begins.  Scroll down to "green box" (below) and click on "Comment".  It must be concise, and focused on the Open Government Initiative (or else it will not be approved).  Commentors can choose to remain anonymous.

B.  Email a comment/question Confidentially to your host Stephen Buckley, who fully understands the risk of raising unwelcome questions within the government.  Mr. Buckley can then raise the question "on-air" without identifying you.

C.  Call-in "live" to (917) 388-4210 with your comment/question.  However --  The host will NOT answer callers until AFTER all the posted Comments (see link, below) have been addressed.  Callers are welcome to add/ask a "follow-up" to those posted Comments.


Handy Links to "Open Government":

1.  President's Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government (1/21/09)

2.  White House's Open Government Directive (12/8/09)

3.  OMB's "Initial Assessment of OpenGov Plans" of Federal Agencies

4.  OMB's "OpenGov Dashboard" for tracking Compliance by Federal Agencies

5.  GovLoop's Chart of the OpenGov Plans

6.  Transparent Leadership by Roger Schwarz (Government Executive magazine, 4/7/10)

"When you are transparent, you create better results and relationships because others understand your thinking. People always are trying to find the meaning of actions, especially leaders' behaviors. When you fail to be transparent, you increase the chance that others will come up with their own theories about your intentions and motives - theories that often will differ from yours.

7.  Open Government Directive Workshop (#5 in Series) was Monday, May 24th (1:00 to 4:30pm) at U.S. Dept. of Treasury.  (OGD Workshops info here.)

8.  OSTP's Open Government Webpage, including the following links:

a.  OSTP's Open Government Plan 1.0 (4/7/10)

9.  OpentheGovernment's Evaluation of OpenGov Plans by federal agencies. For the press-release, click here.
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4 comments:

Jen Neville said...

Stephen,

Thanks for your time today on the OGD call. I do have a follow-up question:

How do we show managers the benefit of open government and transparency(not just the repercussions)?

Lucas Cioffi said...

Yesterday's OpenGov Community Summit had the participants discussing what they see the best case scenario, worst case scenario, and the most likely scenario for how the open government community will evolve throughout 2010. What is Eugene Huang's estimation of the best and worst case scenarios?

Anonymous said...

Is OMB going to do a scoring and evaluation similar to what OTG.org did? And if so, when?

Anonymous said...

What is the official date by which the Open Government Plans need to be updated? My agency was told informally that it would be 45 days from May 1st. And we don't know whether it's going to be another self-assessment and/or one by OMB.

In addition, the folks from OpentheGovernment gave us the same time-frame for when they would be reevaluating our Plan, i.e., mid-June.

So I would like some clarification on what the story is.