Importance of Transparency in Government by Kellsey Ruppel

Open government is not a new concept – its modern roots can be traced back to efforts by democratic societies to bring openness to government dealings. In the United States, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) dates back to the mid 1960’s. Today, most national governments, states, provinces, municipalities and other government jurisdictions have committed to increased transparency. Most recognize that a transparent government is an essential element of a free and democratic society. The White House issued a Memorandum titled “Transparency and Open Government” that states “Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” The memorandum lists three key principles:

1. Government should be transparent.
2. Government should be participatory.
3. Government should be collaborative.

Open Government policies are already helping to contribute to the awareness off citizens and public entities, the success of partnering organizations (such as sub-agencies and authorities) and innovation of new government services. With open data and service policies in place, we are faced with the fundamental requirement to apply those policies to our daily operations as easily and cost-effective as possible.

How is information shared and accessed in State and Local government?
The Sunlight Foundation is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses the tools of civic tech, open data, policy analysis, and journalism to make our government and politics more complete, equitable and effective democratic participation. Let’s use this foundation’s guiding best-practices as a model to lay out how information is being made available for sharing and re-use.

• Sharing qualitative data in the form of objective reporting
• Building informative and intuitive websites and mobile apps
• Providing access to APIs that power existing applications to be re-used by others

In order to deliver these Open Government services, there are intrinsic technology needs to:

• Secure document collaboration and distribution
• Rapidly develop mobile friendly user experiences
• Manage and measure the performance of access to disparate systems
• Automate self-service requests to data and services

Implementing cloud-based solutions can not only make government more efficient and cost-effective, but also improve the accessibility to information and data.

Oracle and Open Government
Oracle offers a wide variety of Cloud technology and application products that can support government transparency efforts in these key areas:

1. Technology infrastructure
2. Information access and presentation
3. Service performance
4. Budget/financial Information
5. Access to Public Documents
6. Read the complete article here.

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