Open Government vs Open Governance

By Maya Nair, based on work of Dan Bevarly:

On a humble attempt to deciphere the theme of this week’s discussions, I stumbled upon  http://www.aheadofideas.com/?p=590 written by Dan Bevarly which I later realised was also mentioned in one of the forums. I found it to be an easy read and decided to visualize the content in a table form as below:

 

Open Government

Open Governance

Definition and Differences

  • Structured by the government with access to information and communication. Standardized and you get what you see.
  • Open government has to do with the institution itself and its structure, or mechanics.
  • Open government directives do not require what we have come to call Web 2.0 solutions to be successful. 

 

  • Facilitates collaborative exchange among individuals or groups of people. Allows people to consult in an open setting based on what is arranged by the government. You get what you see, but at the same time you are allowed to change what you see according to how you would like to see it.
  • Open governance has to do with its processes.
  • Will require the collaborative technologies provided in Web 2.0 solutions to succeed.

 

Keywords

Transparency, Inclusive, Accessibility

Widespread, Public Engagement, Web 2.0

Examples

 

 

Common Denominator: The Internet

What has helped me to understand the difference between open governance and open government could be taken from a job experience. Working in a broadband helpdesk, we had about 10 teams totaling to about 100 odd helpdesk personnel. The structure of the workplace is having an Operations and a Support team that could be seen as an open government of the workplace.

A knowledge portal and training is arranged to ensure all employees are well equipped with the knowledge required to service the customers. Beneath this structure, employees continue to collaborate with one another by assisting each other in solving difficult issues, especially when the answer to these issues are not found on the Knowledge Portal or while undergoing training.

The team leads also makes the effort to collate these peer to peer learning experiences and communicates the solutions found to the Support Team.  In this sense, there is a close collaboration between peer to peer and organisational learning which is supported by a somewhat open governance approach. What made this collaboration work well is the common interest of all employees to improve themselves and their peers in providing consistent and quality service to the customers.

Motivation from the Operations also helped to ensure employees take the effort to learn from each other. The willingness of the Support team to be open to learn from the employees and not act as the “know it all” increased employee engagement in improving the knowledge portal and training. The safety concern is addressed by ensuring that the information or learning experiences communicated is validated by the Support team and is shared across the organisation once the solution is deemed accurate and usable.

In an organisation, I guess the argument that comes to mind is even if we want to implement the open governance approach in terms of learning, there would still need to be a support structure to ensure accuracy of information as we wouldn’t want to have one person saying that this modem is not suitable for the connection speed you intend to use while the other says otherwise.  In this context, the challenge is due to the nature of work that deals with factual statements. It could pose a monetary risk to the organisation if it is not communicated correctly to the customers/clients.

Yet in other contexts, open governance poses benefits as explained in Michel Bauwen’s Integral Visioning as using a common path/understanding but implementing this common thread of thought according to the needs and cultural differences of the environment we live in.

Feel free to add your thoughts to the diagram above J

Source: http://open-governance-and-learning.posterous.com/open-government-vs-open-governance

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.