Transcript of Open Government Federal Advisory Committee public meeting (Number 01)

Oct. 23, 2024

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  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON: Good afternoon. We are about to start in a few minutes. If I can ask everyone to take your seats, please.  At this time, we are about to start. If we can ask everyone to have their seats. Thank you.

      Good afternoon and welcome to the inaugural public meeting of the Open Government Federal Advisory Committee. It is a Federal committee subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

      My name is Arthur Brunson and I’m the Designated Federal Officer or DFO, and Daniel York, you will hear from soon, serves as the alternate DFO of this committee.  As part of my role at the DFO I manage the day-to-day operations of the committee. I attend all committee meetings and ensure the committee operates in full compliance with Federal Advisory Committee act

      The Open Government Federal Advisory Committee 15-member composition includes 11 Special Government Employees known as SGE’s. SGE’s are experts in their fields who serve on Federal Advisory Committees, providing independent judgment based on their individual expertise. They are subject to conflict-of-interest laws and regulations. And we have four regular government employees, which I will reference as RGE’s. Our Federal employees appointed officers to serve on this committee. The purpose of the OG FAC Chair is to advise GSA on Open Government initiatives putting GSA’s creation, limitation, and monitoring of the US Open Government Nation Action Plans and commitments.

      Additionally, the OG FAC Chair will advise GSA’s administrator on emerging open government issues, challenges, and opportunities, supporting a US Open Government Secretariat. Reminder for all OG FAC faculty members. All virtual attendees are reminded to keep your line muted and to unmute yourself when it’s your turn to speak. State your name to help the public identify who is speaking. We also ask that you update your name in zoom to include members.

      Members, would you like to ask a question or make a comment, use the raise hand feature by clicking the reaction box at the bottom of your screen and wait to be acknowledged before speaking.

      All audience participants, virtual and in-person, who have signed up to provide oral comments, please be reminded are to use no more than three minutes of time for your oral public comments, and you will be timed. We have seven requests from the public in which to provide comments. The opportunity to provide your comment is scheduled to start at approximately 3 PM. When that time comes, we will display a slide listing the order of who is talking. We will start with our virtual oral comments first and then move to those in the room, who are asked to line up to the right of the stage, my left, in the order shown on the slide. Thank you in advance for making the public comments a smooth process.

      For those attending in person, the restrooms located to my left after leaving the auditorium. Go forward towards the security desk where you checked in. The hallway directly behind the security desk on the right side is where you will find them. There are staff members near the access who can assist you as well.

      As a reminder, this meeting is open to the public and is being recorded. A copy of the recording along with the meeting minutes and a list of attendees will be posted at usopen.gov, in the coming days.

      Before we get started, I’d like to move to the attendance before we go over the agenda. Let’s take attendance and assure we have a quorum. I ask that all members who are online to unmute your microphones at this time, and those in the auditorium please be prepared to respond for the attendance. When it’s your turn, Laura will pass you the mic and we will be sure to record you. When you hear your name called, please respond with present or here. Joyce Ayaji. Charles Cutshall. Amy Holmes. Absent. Kristen Honey. Ronald Keefover. Here.  Steven Kull. Present. Janice Luong. Present. Ade Odutola. Present. Suzanne here. Daniel Schuman. Present. Josh Tauberer. Present. Did you not get that? Bobby Talebain. Present. Corinna Turbes. Present. Amy Holmes. Present. I’m here. Present. Thank you.

      Thank you for your responses. We have a quorum, so we will proceed by reviewing today’s meeting. On the agenda today we will have remarks from GSA leadership and White House leadership, followed by an overview of the US Open Government Secretariat, remarks by the Chair, followed by Q&A from the committee members, and then a 10-minute break. After the break, we will hear from Open Government partnership providing a history overview of the Open Government partnership, then a history of the US Open efforts, the Nation Action Plan, NAP-6 development timeline, then we will move to the OG FAC Chair Committee discussion that will be followed with public oral comments, White House remarks, and closing remarks.

      As we prepare to hear from the GSA administrator, I would like to say thank you to all of our presenters, attendees, stakeholders for joining us today, including those who will provide public comment. All public comments submitted to ogfac@gsa.gov  mailbox have been provided to the members and will be posted to our website

      At this time, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome GSA administrator, Robin Carnahan, to took off our meeting for today. 

      >> ROBIN CARNAHAN:  I’m glad to have partners from the White House and across — from civil society, from the public, both in person and online. We are all here because we believe that openness and transparency in government are fundamental to the success of democracy. We know that more participation means more transparency and more transparency brings more accountability, and all of that is to build public trust that governments are really acting in the interest of the People they serve

      I just want to point out as a reminder to all of us that I’ve spent much of my career with a thread of Open Government and transparency and accountability running through it. I served as Secretary of State in my home state of Missouri. It was my job to ensure that elections were free, fair, and accessible for everyone. As a board member at the national Democratic Institute, I promoted participation and democracy around the world. I worked the civil society groups all across the globe

      And now in my role here as GSA’s administrator, I’m very proud to be able to work on the Biden-Harris administration to continue this important work. And I can say that no matter which of the roles that I played, one thing has become crystal clear; that is none of this succeeds or progresses without really close collaboration between folks in government, folks outside of government.

      The good news is that in many parts of the world, we are seeing more and better collaboration. Last, we —, for those of us who were able to be there. A couple last month, we sighed in general assembly in New York. Within the kind of collaboration that we –never seen before between the White House and State Department of GSA doing this work together

      As you all know, the GSA — the work domestically, and we are the home of the government Secretariat, so it’s our team’s job to make sure that work across Federal agencies, domestic and international stakeholders to develop and implement the next Nation Action Plan

      I want to say beyond that task and role of GSA, we actually have lots of team at GSA doing our own version of Open Government related work in trying to make things more accessible to the public and create economic opportunities across the country. I would encourage if you haven’t seen some of those to take a look. I’ll name a couple. One is recently put out a new specialized resource guide for Generative AI. The idea is that this is something that many governments are grappling with how to do this in responsible ways. We’ve had teams diving into what some of those guardrails ought to be to protect the public and to protect our national security.

      Another good resource is a Federal IT dashboard. It shows how agencies spend dollars and that it’s actually accessible to everyone. A vast repository of data that citizens in public, anybody can take a look at to see how government is operating and functioning. And then of course there’s challenge.gov which we all know about and love because it’s a way to crowd source innovative ideas that we can put to work in scale within the government. We’ve seen so many, just dozens and dozens have great ideas in recent years, whether about universal access and design or whether about technology solutions and operability, there’s lots of things that you can find on challenge.gov that came from the public.

      Today, we are here recognizing and celebrating another really important step in this work. That is the first ever, first ever Open Government Federal Advisory Committee. I will say that as I think about all of this, the notion about citizen participation and transparency and accountability, none of that is new. It’s baked into our Constitution. It’s baked into our net DNA as Americans. What is new is I think about this is how people expect to have this transparency and accountability and engagement.

      These days I think about it in several different ways that I hope you will consider. The first is looking at Open Government through the lens of technology. Why? Because that’s how people expect to be able to interact with our government these days. We are thinking about how to make it easier to access authority government sources. If you think about it, what is authoritative data? A lot of that is originally government data, whether that’s about your personal identity, whether about corporate identity, whether about property ownership, it might be about land records, whether government data spending, so much of what we think about as important data generated by the government. So, we understand with the rise of AI and large language models that increasingly to build trust we need to make sure that that data is easily accessible and machine readable. That is an issue that I hope you will think about — would like to think about as we go forward.

      We also want to think about Open Government through the lens of equity. It is the job of government to serve everyone, 300 million Americans make sure they get the service they deserve. The Biden-Harris administration has understood that and they want and are committed to have a government that works for everyone. GSA, what we have been doing on that front is tumbling down on support for historically marginalized groups, whether tribal nations or small businesses want to do this is with the government. We’ve also promoted work around digital accessibility and we are interested in doing more of that.

      The third lens that I hope you consider that you look at this work through the lens of immunity. What does that mean? It really does mean it takes all of us working together to make sure that our government operates in the ways we expect. If we think about that technology accessibility community as a Federal Advisory Committee, I think we can all come up with ways we can do better, ways we can serve the American people better, ways that we can be models in the world better. I want to say thank you in advance for your work here. I know many of you are doing this as other jobs as a side. You have plenty of other work in your life and you do this work as your passion, and you’re there and you understand that Open Government, transparency, accountability is foundational if we are going to have a healthy democracy. Thank you in advance for all of that. My goal here is that we can probably be able to say not only that we are a government that is of the People, by the People, and for the People, but also the government is with the people. There’s a lot of work to be done and I’m ready to get to work. Thank you all.

[APPLAUSE]

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you for those inspiring remarks. It is always great to have leadership support from the top, which is one of the roles I have experienced with you in the very beginning. Your attendance are testament to your commitment you have shown from the very first day I started working with the Open Government Secretariat a little over a year ago. Now we will have remarks from Justin Vale, special assistant to the president for democracy and civil participation at the White House

  >> JUSTIN VAIL: The domestic policy Council is responsible for helping to coordinate efforts across Federal Government, across agencies to develop and implement the Biden-Harris Administration’s Domestic Agenda. The President and Vice President, since day one, made the protection, reservation and defense of American democracy a central cause of their administration.

      That includes protecting the freedom to vote in free, fair and secure elections, restoring the rule of law, preserving democratic institutions independence of our judiciary and law enforcement, powdering corruption and ensuring that Americans have ethical government that works for them. It includes the work of advancing Open Government. While support for Open Government is always important, we note that this work is especially urgent as we sit democratic backsliding across the globe, and continue to face present threats to our democracy here at home, including declining trust in our government and democratic institutions.

      We note that improving responsiveness, accountability, and transparency of the Federal Government is critical to strengthening our democracy. The Biden-Harris Administration have provided the work we have accomplished thus far, and we remain committed to making government information, research and data more available and accessible to the public, and also creating meaningful opportunities for the public to have a say in the decisions that impact their lives. We know that early proactive and continuous efforts to break down barriers to public participation and meet the public where they are, to engage in the work of government: one, a result in better policy design and program administration because as policies become more closely designed to reflect and respond to the needs of people that they are benefiting, including underserved communities. Open Government can help us demonstrate that democracy and can still deliver to tackle the greatest challenges of our time and meet the needs of Americans.

      There’s a growing body of evidence that indicates that participation can help improve trust in government, a survey by the economic cooperation and development found that 69% of those who feel they have a say in government actions trust government, while only 22% trust government among those who do not feel they have a say in government actions. A recent partnership for public survey in government trust in government 40% of trust in government, only 27% believe that government listens to the public, and only 23% believe that the public is transparent. So, we have work to do. that by making the government more transparent and expanding public participation and engagement, we can create that virtuous cycle, that virtuous cycle that encourages our public to participate, build trust and confidence in government and democratic institutions.

      So that’s why we’ve been at work. For example, this administration has taken action to make it easy for the public to weigh in on the regulatory process as Federal agencies work to craft rules and regulations that impact people’s lives. Of course, there’s so much work ahead of us. The work to advance Open Government is not always easy. Open Government is not a final destination, it is a journey and a journey that we can continue to improve on, that we must continue to improve on as we navigate this journey.

      I want to thank administrator Carnahan for her leadership, her steadfast commitment in bringing her personal experience and passion to this work, and for the US Open Government Secretariat for their incredible work for just 12 months to elevate experience and enhance Open Government in the Open Democratic partnership. We are working to institutionalize this work. Institutionalize it as a crosscutting priority across the work of government, and to build it, embed it into the fiber of how we approach our work so we can better serve the American people. Of course, we cannot navigate this journey alone; it requires true collaboration and partnership with civil society.

      I want to thank all of civil society and members of the public that are here today that are joining us virtually for their enduring commitment to this work. I want to congratulate the new members of the Federal Advisory Committee. And thank you for stepping up to serve. We know that this is work that you are passionate about, and your professional expertise, your life experience, your insights and inputs and pushing and prodding will help us navigate this journey together and make our government more open. We are eager to continue to strengthen our collaboration and work with the American public as we continue to build an American democracy that is open, responsive and inclusive for all. Thank you again for being with us today.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you for being with us today and your supportive remarks. It’s always great to have White House leadership support from the top, which is also been one of the joys I’ve experienced in this role. Our first presenter is Daniel York, the director of the US Open Government Secretariat. At this time, while he’s coming to the podium, I’d like to provide a special note that at the end of all remarks, committee members will be invited to ask questions. At this time, members both online and in the room may raise their hands of — not right now but after he’s finished, to be recognized and we will allow you to ask your question. Daniel York.

  >> DANIEL YORK:  Good afternoon. Thank you, Arthur. Thank you to the committee for inviting me today. This is essential work we’re doing at the US Open Government Secretariat and driving transparency, accountability and public transparency.

      The Open Government Partnership or OGP has its roots in a 2009 Open Government directive and memorandum with transparency and Open Government. From there in 2011, the US went on to become a founding member of OGP as a global initiative, and foster open and accountable governance. I believe the committee here will be hearing from OGP later in the afternoon so I won’t touch on too much of that. The US has been seen as an integral part of from the beginning launching our first Open Government Nation Action Plan in 2011 and continuing for subsequent NAPS, the latest being published in December 2022. In 2023 with congressional funding, we took significant steps forward by stylish and US Open Government Secretariat to oversee the device to commitment as members of OGP, and help drive Open Government initiatives across executive branch.

      To understand how this all comes together, it’s important to recognize the roles and how this all works at the Federal level. The White House office of Science and Technology Policy provides policy leadership. The Gen. Services Administration where I lead the US Open Government Secretariat manages domestic implementation and internationally, we collaborate with the Department of Safety.

      As you can see, I don’t do this work alone. I’m fortunate to have an incredible team of dedicated individuals who make this all possible. All you hear from some of them today, each person you see here on the screen, plays a critical role in the success of our efforts. Together we work closely with Federal partners, members of civil society and public at large to achieve our impactful results.

      US Open Government Secretariat manages three key areas. First, we oversee the NAP and make sure they are tracked and reported. Secondly, NAP 6. How best to shape the responsive and accountable government. Third, stakeholder engagement. Consultations events facilitating transparent — into that.

      NAP 5.  We are published — we launch commitment tracker, and all of that can be found at gsa.gov at USopengov.  Additionally, we completed a midterm self-assessment.  After the process, we may identify areas we can improve to ensure accountability. We expect to publish our last NAP in December. This fall we kicked off — it’s currently out for the public to comment on. We encourage everyone to participate. This is a critical opportunity for the public to provide input on identifying challenges, opportunities, innovative approaches where you can use to shape the next NAP. We are asking the public for their help in four areas: the first, identification, problem identification, what challenges can we take on with Open Government? How can Open Government address challenges. We are looking for opportunities to bolt on existing networks, and how we can leverage ongoing networks inside and outside government. We can make innovative approaches which with emerging technologies and new strategies can enhance participation. Lastly, resources and recommendations. What existing analysis or reports can we take information from?

      This committee will both share RFI with their network, as well as invite us back as a Secretariat to one of their future meetings, and provide an overview of all the feedback you receive.

      The committee is essential — the committee is essential to the co-creation process. As a multistate culture form, we hope this committee will foster collaborate government, so collaboration between government and civil society. The structured environment allows for all voices to be heard and insures we develop policies that reflect the first perspective of citizens and organizations.

      Your role at GSA’s vital to make sure we meet our goals. In July of this year, US government made a challenge commitment to Open Government — focused on inclusion in trust work with the American public. As a part of that commitment the US will create a Federal framework, guidelines and leading practices for public participation and community engagement that will strengthen and expand these efforts across Federal agencies. To support that implementation, the US will provide agencies with tools and resources, including US Federal PPC toolkit, a dynamic repository of best practices guidance, and test studies. [on the slide] for more participation as it comes out.  Our partnership with civil society is important to advance governing principles. The civil society organizations and those we have partnered with. If you know any organizations that want to partner with us, please tell them to reach out.

      Finally, shameless plug because I have the mic for five minutes. I want to share with you if you a key point today with what’s going on at the US Open Government Secretariat.  Please follow us on LinkedIn, that’s the easiest way to see all the meetings, including future Federal Advisory Committee meetings. With that, I want to thank the committee again for your time and dedication not only to the committee, because all of takes some time and energy, but Open Government principles as well. I look forward to answering any questions the committee may have. Does the committee have questions in the room?  Do we have any virtual participants? I’ll turn it back over to Arthur.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Now, for the moment many of us have been waiting for. [laughing] We will hear from the OG FAC chair, Daniel Schuman, who plans to take questions at the end of his remarks from members and then we will take a 10-minute break. Immediately after the break, we will hear from two representatives, from a representative from the Open Government partnership. I am so glad that he is able to join us here in person today. Dan?

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  I guess the first thing is I needed no picture. Thank you all for being here. This is fun. Good afternoon. To all the committee members here in person and for those of you online, thank you for your willingness to serve on The Open Government Federal Advisory Committee. Thank you, administrator Carnahan, for your welcoming remarks. Thank you, Dan York, for the overview of the Open Government Secretariat, and to Arthur who is behind me for calling us to order. Thank you to the representatives from Federal agencies, members of the public and everyone joining this meeting in person and online.

      Today is an important day for the Open Government to the United States because it marks an occasion where we are trying to do something new. This is the inaugural meeting of a Federal budget committee dedicated to furthering government transparency. This is not to say that there have not been prior meetings between civil society and the US Government on transparency. I just saw a handful of them from Dan York. It doesn’t mean there hasn’t been prior efforts to create plans or prior efforts to create community practice. Of course, these efforts have taken place over the years. The history of the United States is replete with efforts to have the government for the People, by the People, for the People. I stole that from Mr. Carnahan. Government, after all bribes, it’s just powers from being informed consent to the government.

      What’s new here is a new instrument for improving government transparency. Committee established by the government and composed society efforts focused on making independent recommendations that further a whole host of government principles on transparency, accountability and public participation. Shipment today, we will talk the hard work of building an Open Government and Advisory Committee that is capable of considering and making wide range of recommendations and of standing the test of time.

      This is a big task, and it comes at a time of great uncertainty. Fortunately, Open Government is a bedrock principle providing stability while there is great turbulence. There can be little doubt that our government’s commitment to this great idea has taken a beating at times, has wavered at times, and has receded at times varied, and even in bad times, dedicated civil servants and members of civil society have kept debate. This can be a moment of renewal. Now is an opportunity to show the flag and — we are here to reinvigorate and to reimagine how Open Government and fortified democracy —

      Our job is to provide independent expert recommendations to the Federal Government as it contemplates undertaking to commitments and strengthening old arrangements. We must render advice to the — Open Nation Action Plan and provide our views in emerging Open Government issues, challenges and opportunities. This is a tall task but we can do it.

      Let’s move to the business at hand. One, a promise that I will not give too many more speeches. I will say to members of the public, in particular to those in open public society, I encourage you to submit your ideas for the upcoming action plan to the Federal Register by November 12. For directions on how to do that you can use your favorite web search engine to look up Federal Register Open Government Nation Action Plan. That is not easy to say. The government will draw from these ideas when drafting its Open Government plan. With the advisory committee will be reviewing the process and recommendations even as we consider our own. The more ideas you submit the more we have to work with.

      In addition, I would encourage everybody to send ideas and recommendations to this committee. OG FAC at GSA.gov. Relevant communication will be distributed to all committee members. This continues to attend these meetings. Go to the website. To visit, go to GSA.gov.  Click on Federal Advisory Committee.

      Today I intend to place before the committee two issues for its consideration during the discussion we will have later on. First, we should address the pace of our work; second, we should talk about how to organize our work. We have a lot that we need to do. We both need to organize how we will manage this committee and also to begin the subsequent work as soon as possible. In doing so, we must operate within significant concerns a Federal law integration practice and or charter. The operation of this department place is significant when it’s on our ability to collaborate outside these meetings. Collaborative documents group emails that include a forum of committee members, generally prohibited if they allow for deliberation outside committee meetings. We have been advised that nonsufficient for us not to make our documents open — in the context of a properly open meeting with the forum present. Our work must occur only when we are meeting under the circumstances, whether in full committee or subcommittee. We are going to spend a lot of time together, guys.

      The rules are challenging us to be flexible in our scheduling of meetings and how to manage the committee. Scheduling of meetings and establishing — allow significant time. It’s my plan to schedule virtual meetings for December and January and February. Arthur and I will send out a survey for each month so we can find a time that accommodates the vast majority of people. The topic of organizing the committee, we are subject to existing laws and regulations committee. Our operations also have no precedent. How do we evaluate ideas for inclusion in our recordation? How do we request input from stakeholders? What topics should we focus on? Every decision we make will become a precedent for future incarnations of The Open Government Federal Advisory Committee. As they said, we need to choose wisely.

      As a starting point, it’s my view that we should collect information on three key topics:  Creating an evaluation, engaging with the public, structuring our subcommittees. Accordingly, I recommend we hold three preparatory meetings composed of no more than six members of the committee to investigate these issues. These preparatory meetings will gather information and report back to us our next full committee meeting so we can celebrate the context that we serve. I drafted some preliminary language on what the focus in the meeting should be, and we can cover that during our discussion. Hopefully, it won’t be too tedious.

      Of course, your ideas, looking at the folks in the room and back on the people online, for other matters we should address during discussions are also welcome. I will recheck to each and all of you with Arthur’s help to gather ideas for the next meeting agenda. Already, we’ve gone from the high concept of upper government to the nitty-gritty of how do we actually build a committee. This is what institution building looks like. I’m excited to build a new upper government institution with all of you.

      Before we take a break, we have a few minutes to see if we can have a conversation about any topic you would like to raise. We’ll get into all that stuff I just talked about during the discussion later on. But if there are any questions or concerns or issues that you would like to raise arising from this event, this is a great time. Yes, please.

  >> KRISTEN HONEY:  Kristen Honey with Health and Human Services. Thanks for framing everything, such important work, and thrilled to be here. One observation I have in the DC political climate, and who knows what the future is going to bring, is having a group to articulate a NorthStar purpose that everyone can agree on, as well as core values of how we operate. Even if we disagree on things, there’s norms in a culture we are setting. I want to put that out there for the group, that articulating a very clear NorthStar purpose that rises above differences, and of the core values of how we operate can be very helpful. I volunteer to help lead that before our next meeting, if folks are interested.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  One thing we talked about at the administrative meetings is we are going to use first names. Who will let me know if there are comments online? Reactions or other thoughts? Please don’t be shy. He is saying that they had spoken with us before the session and he agrees with those comments. Are there any other comments or response? None online? Any other things, if folks would like to raise their hand? It’s my intention to be as supportive of interventions as possible. This is one of the standards that was just identified. You can always pull me aside at another time. With that, Arthur, I think you will lead us to get us ready for the break. Is that right?

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  It’s 1:43 PM now. We are going to take a 10-minute break. We will start again promptly at 1:53 PM. Thank you all.

[BREAK]

>> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Good afternoon. We want to get started. It is now 1:53 PM, and our break has ended. If we could ask everyone to have your seat. Thank you. It is now 1:53 PM Eastern standard Time, and I would like to welcome everyone back to The Open Government Federal Advisory Committee’s Inaugural Public Meeting.

      Next on our agenda I would like to invite Joseph Foti, Principal Advisor on Emerging issues with the International Open Government Partnership to provide a few remarks. Joseph?

  >> JOSEPH FOTI:  Wonderful. Thank you so much and congratulations today for launching this Federal Advisory Committee. I know it’s been a lot of hard work, and I’m hoping that it presents a number of new opportunities for our organization.

      Going to give a quick overview of some good practices, in OGP, from the international perspective, what the rules are and what works. I work here in Washington DC where a large part of the international support unit of the Open Government Partnership is based. I have been around in OGP — I think tomorrow is my 12-year anniversary of working at the support unit and independent reporting. I’m going to go quickly through a very quick history because I think a lot of what I’m going to say might be repetitive of what others have said. Next slide.

      OGP is currently at 77 countries, we’re very excited to say. We added a couple of members in the last few months. More than 150 local governments including here in the United States: New York, Los Angeles and others, and more than a thousand civil society organizations, members of state and local governments, those types of things, around the world. That’s in the 12 years that we’ve had, and it was founded by eight governments and eight civil society organizations.

      OGP is not just a Topshop, and also not a tree-based organization, but it is an international partnership which means that commitments are voluntary but there is a process. To be a member — you have to follow certain rules to be a member. Want to go what we call a multi-stakeholder form, and here in the United States it takes the shape of a Federal — you’ll see the abbreviation — pardon all the jargon — but we wouldn’t be an international organization if we didn’t have just as much. I’m speaking to people who are familiar with government operations.

      The core functions from an international perspective of a multi-stakeholder forum are to support the oversight of the OGP process and standards, including informing the independent reporting mechanism process. That’s one of the things that makes OGP familiar. You may not be familiar with the independent — an independent process of whether they moved the needle in the independent context and with what the ultimate result of the mark. The second one we have covered well today is about being inclusive of lots of different people, making sure that the multi-stakeholder forum is a window from the action plan to the rest of the country.

      There are many objectives because we define a lot of these things through participatory processes. I will run quickly through secondary ones that are also important. One of the things is ambition. OGP is not supposed to be a rehashing of things already done or things that were already in the pipeline; there are supposed to be things that are difficult in action plans. They are supposed to be ambitious and to move the needle. One of the roles of a multi-stakeholder forum is to communicate outside of itself to other stakeholders. That means listening, as well as documenting.

      The next thing which is obviously imminent, regardless of the election, is helping to transition across political cycles. We find that countries that have strong multi-stakeholder forums and a strong civil servant working in those and multi-stakeholder forums have higher rates of implementation. We can share this statistically and that’s important.

      Modern-day support of the design in the plan. Connecting with other countries. Hopefully some of you will be able to host people when they come to Washington DC, talk to them and likewise be able to visit people in other countries to learn the best of what they have to offer, and to share the best of what you have to offer, motivating participating parties and strengthening participating stakeholders. Let’s move to the next slide.

      Okay, the rules. These standards are the rules that you have to follow to be part of OGP. What makes OGP unique is it’s not the Montréal protocol that says you can’t do this kind of — now you’ve signed the treaty, it’s against the law. It’s a process where you decide the content of the action plan, but there are rules on the process. I want to run through these fairly quickly.

      One is to establish a space for dialogue. We are well underway to doing that here today. As Daniel has shown, that’s already been started. I’m sure that work will continue. Providing open, accessible, and timely information about activities and progress within OGP. There’s a lot of great documentation on the slide, but there will also be — we can talk a bit more about progress monitoring in the second.

      Providing inclusive and informed opportunities for public participation. Today we will have a comment period, one of many providing a reasoned response and entering meaningful participation. This is where they get a little difficult and not all multi-stakeholder forums and government processes succeed at this part equally well. You get a lot of public input. What does it mean to get back, to prioritize on that? I’ll give you a couple of good examples of that today.

      Provide inclusive and informed opportunities for participation in implementation and monitoring of the action plan. This is another area that some governments and members multi-stakeholder forums don’t do as well. There’s a big burst of creating an action plan and then it doesn’t get sustained.

      I used to work for the independent reporting mechanism and for the data teams, government support unit. We have a lot of math that we can do because we have 5000 commitments, we have 2 or 300 action plans; I can’t remember, but way more than that now. We can look at that and tell you two things that are important. On average, stronger participation, but here we mean if you actually document feedback and why you prioritize things and didn’t, results — it’s statistically meaningful, not just meaningful. The next one is come monitoring past at the moment of creating, getting the new action plan has a higher rate of implementation. We can show those two things are correlated.

      As you consider what your subcommittees might be, one guidepost might be to take a look at the Open Government challenge. You may not be able to do all of these things. You might have different things that are not on this list but that’s up to the committee. These are 10 areas that collectively, globally, the 77 national members, 150 local members have decided are strategically important for people to align on. A lot of these have already been covered under pre-existing Nation Action Plans but there are areas you may wish to dive deeper and we can provide plenty of information on this. These are the 10 areas. I won’t read them to you because I think you can do them perfectly well. Next slide.

      Two questions for this working group — sorry, this advisory committee — is how does this one interface with agencies and their constituents? I came from an environment of Akron before I worked at OGP, so I would see how the Department of Interior and OSHA and how they work for their different constituencies, how sometimes it worked well together and sometimes didn’t. I hope this diagram isn’t too complicated, but at the center you had the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and one of the questions to subcommittees, how do you interact with those constituents inside and outside of government and other levels of government. The next one is how does The Open Government Federal Advisory Committee interact with the interagency working groups on Open Government or other related topics. These are interesting questions, where the rubber meets the road, how to you get to ambition there.

      I wanted to show you two examples of other countries who you might see as references. One of the things that the Canadians do on this recent response is, when they get inputs, they do what we heard reports and it says, “Canadian said this. Here’s why we did incorporate and why we didn’t and these matched the statutes or these are not a priority right now. “They are honest about the feedback. I think that’s a good model we have others that were happy to share with you. We can put you in touch with people in Canada who tried that.

      Australia has a great roadmap if you go to their website on how they formed their working groups and what the steps were to get to working group processes, and to decide we are going to do in anticorruption, migration, this topic and this topic, that’s what’s important to Australians and AI, whatever they worked on. How did they prioritize — the question we get from people, is this legitimate. Open Government is everything but we try to do everything at once, we don’t get everything done. How do we prioritize? I wanted to give you these two examples because it’s complicated, and it’s a take to deal with complexity. Other people have done it, and we have many more examples to share with you. I think that’s my last slide. I’m happy to take questions.

      >> DANIEL SCHUMAN: Thank you for that presentation. A fair amount of what you like about our things we have been trying to figure out as well. I know I have and I suspect we all will have a lot more questions. Who’s the right person to chat with over there? Do you have more resources in terms of details about how people create rubrics for evaluating what they’re going to do? Do you have any examples of that so we don’t have to re-create from the start? It would be really helpful.

  >> JOSEPH FOTI:   Reach out to Pepe as your primary contact and the rest of us will support and try to get you rebirth examples from other countries. Some countries have used Trello to manage their Nation’s Action Plan, which is not a problem. Other people have open-source dashboards that have been built and shared across Latin America. There’s lots of ways to work that and it should comply with the law and be ambitious, allow us to be out how to folks.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  I know the structure we will be under will be challenging and useful at the same time.

  >> KRISTEN HONEY:  I just want to say thanks for this information and the bright spots. Super helpful. The 10 Open Government challenge areas, it struck me that health wasn’t on there. And one of thing out of the pandemic is how human health touches so many things we do in government. I’m wondering if you could say or you see Health and Human Services fitting into those 10 areas.

  >> JOSEPH FOTI:   Great question. I think there’s a few places, and there’s a lot of text that goes with those. Her stuff, things don’t all have to fit those challenge areas. Those are suggested areas that are popular. There are plenty of helpful — a few areas that are a natural fit. One is the quality information. Under the digital, how do we know what’s verified and how do we know what’s true? There’s work on information integrity, which I think is essential. There’s also a number of commitments on inclusion and I think reaching this community that are most in need of Health and Human Services approach, are important. You shouldn’t feel limited by those commitments. If there are priorities for the US that fall outside of that, that’s normal and fine. Other folks in the room?

  >> CHARLIE CUTSHALL:  My name is Charlie Cutshall with the Department of Commerce. I don’t mean for this to be a controversial question. I really appreciate all the work of OGP, that the opening comments we heard today, there was acknowledgment of global backsliding in democracy, and perhaps backsliding with commitments to Open Government. You have been working in this area for a long time and you’ve shared that there are thousands of commitments and a number of Nation Action Plans you can’t put your thumb quite on. What do you think the driving factors are that are leading to the backslide, that perhaps we need to focus on, think about differently in approaching the development of Nation Action Plan or government generally?

  >> JOSEPH FOTI:   Good question. I’m not sure I can even begin to answer that within the time limit. Let me suggest — I think there’s a number of opportunities here around — I think someone mentioned veracity of government — the administrator mentioned how do we know if there’s a verified high-quality information, is going to be one component there. I think one thing that we struggled with is making sure that the commitments are really central to tackling some of these problems. I don’t want to go over my time limit, but let’s discuss more. Maybe this is something that’s really relevant to look at within some of the subcommittees, and if we have a Q&A session at some point. It’s worth tackling these questions and asking what can be done in the scope of an Open Government action plan, and how have other people to help with this in the United States. We have unique constraints, but we are also a country that does some impossible things every once in a while. Let’s discuss further is what I’d say. Not to evade the question. I’d love to discuss that for like hours.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Before we take the next question, I want to ask that we all be reminded that the session today is being recorded. If you could speak in the microphone loudly, as well as the speakers to come up next, thank you.

  >> CHARLIE CUTSHALL:   Again, thinking about data-driven evidence-based decision-making and policy objectives, the PEW research Center has done a fantastic job since the 1960s up until tracking trust in government in the United States. It’s hard to believe, but at a certain point when they started doing this, 8/10 people trusted work in government. Someone in the audience said, “oof.” When I look at that, I thought that was pretty remarkable. I think we all acknowledge that with respect to trust, when trust is lost it requires a great effort to win that trust back.

  >> JOSEPH FOTI:   I’m wondering if there are similar research centers or similar data available in countries that have committed to Open Government in doing these Nation Action Plans where there has been a measurable uptick in the trust that is being identified or shared by individuals, everyday people on the ground on those countries.

      The reason I ask is that maybe just maybe there’s something in those Nation Action Plans which are making a more meaningful difference in the everyday lives of people that we might want to look at and take into consideration. Suzanne is going to know more about this than I am. Let me say I think there’s wonderful work being done right now by the organization for economic development on the drivers of trust research and what’s working. Under certain circumstances, Open Government is a driver of trust. In other circumstances it may not be. One of the tasks of this group is thinking about where can that trust be enhanced, and where is the Open Government role for that — I have ideas. Again, I don’t think I should lobby you all from up here on certain ideas that might work, particularly about commerce, but it can be a driver of trust.

I think there are other things outside of Open Government, like polarization, that would be harder for this group to tackle, but maybe it can. There’s a lot of room for creativity there. You’ve also questioned about higher levels of trust where things are more visible, not so much about openness but about visibility. People trust Open Government and brands and things that they see as close to them. What does that mean for us in a way that we have hidden a lot of our work in government has hidden its work in a lot of ways. There are ways to build trust there. These are questions I would raise. There are a lot of examples. I think there are a lot of examples where the government can increase legitimacy. We can revisit these philosophical questions. Suzanne probably has six research papers on the way on this exact topic.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:I think we have a question online. Josh Tauberer.

  >> JOSH TAUBERER: I have a mundane question. I’m interested in the reporting mechanism. How does independent reporting — how has independent reporting worked in the past, especially in the US as you know. What are we coming into as an existing process? Also, if we’re running low on time on this part, we can always go over this another time.

  >> JOSEPH FOTI:   I like this question because it’s less philosophical. They put out three reports. The first report is a report that closes out the last action plan and makes recommendations to this group and to everyone in the country on what the next action plan could do to improve its process, and then publishes a report on how well this process is going and what’s in the action plan, what are the ambitious commitments. I forgot the name of each type of report. Finally, it does a closing report, and implementation report that sees if you implemented what you promise to implement and if not, why not. They are from shortest to longest, as well. Hopefully, I can introduce you to Juan, staff member in charge of the United States independent reporting mechanism process.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON: Thank you for that. Josh, do you have a follow-up? Are there other questions? I suspect we will want to hear more from you or your colleagues. It seems there are a lot of questions and a lot of areas we can learn from, what’s happening internationally. Thank you for the presentation.

  >> JOSEPH FOTI:   We have an open-door policy. Please reach out to us and we’re happy to answer any questions that you have.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you for your insight. Now I’d like to ask Dr. Suzanne Piotrowski, a director of transparency in government center — on the history of Open Government in the United States. Thank you.

  >> DR. SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI:  Hi, everybody. I am going to — let me put my timer on so I don’t go over. In 10 minutes or less, I’m going to give an overview of Open Government in the United States. Obviously, a lot is going to be left out. Some of you I’ve known for a while but I’ve been in this space for 20 years. Did my dissertation but I know a lot of you know a lot more about Open Government than I do, so I look forward to your feedback at the end.

      I’m going to do a little bit of defining Open Government and go into a brief history. I can’t help myself; I am a professor so I give you some homework and future readings in the slide deck, and it will be online. Next slide, please.

      This is really a question for us as the Federal Advisory Committee, or I note that there are multiple definitions of Open Government, as with most things. Common construct in the literature is vision and voice. Vision is the ability to see what’s going on inside of government embodied by transparency, the public transparency. Voice is the ability to co-create and work with government, have an impact, the public value or participation.

      Transparency and participation are key values that you are used in almost all — other ones, collaboration. I’ve seen empowerment, usability and accessibility of information. I’ve seen accountability is an output of Open Government. The administrator added community to this. There’s a lot of different ways to think about Open Government. None are wrong, we just need to know what we’re talking about.

      It’s a little visual. I’m not even so sure it’s very good. I tend to think about Open Government as transparency, accountability, and participation. In each of these, there are lots of different ways — there are lots of different types of accountability. There are lots of different types of transparency. We need to think about when you peel back the onion, what is it worth thinking about when we mean Open Government. I’m not sure if it’s right with technology in the middle, but many of how we currently think about Open Government tends to be a large focus on technology. I for one come in strongly that you do not have to have technology to have all aspects of Open Government. If you think of a traditional town hall meeting, someone standing up and speaking, someone here speaking is also a form of participation. But we do tend to think about technology currently when we think about Open Government.

      I’m going to go quickly through the decades. I’m going to start in about 2000. As the administrator mentioned, these are ideas and policies and concepts that have been here long before anyone was saying Open Government. With respect to transparency, for he has been around a long time. There’s a lot of ways to think about these. Accountability mechanisms. I just want to know that maybe just thinking about Open Government as a whole is a new way of thinking about it, but the individual values have been around for a long time.

      In my presentation, I’m going to highlight some state and local initiatives, generally. More is left out than is included in this presentation, let’s just say that. Before I get to 2000s, just note that in the 90s, we had an expansion of government websites. We started seeing more and more things online. This decade was largely defined by 9/11. We tend to think about secrecy as opposed to Open Government in this decade. But then when you start looking at it there are a lot of things that were done in this period of time to start moving Open Government along, not the least of which is the office of government information services was opened done. OGIS.

      I do want to note, and I’ll have some examples that things have been happening locally. Right here in DC, they had a very early data portal in around 2007. As we know in 2009, the Obama executive order, first day of office, the memo on transparency and Open Government.

      In hindsight, which we have now, this really defines how we think about Open Government. Following on that with Open Government directives, and part of that where they asked these agencies to produce biannual Open Government plans, and those plans were really the precursor led to what we see in the OGP as this Nation Action Plan.

      Now things are starting to heat up. It’s like a thousand flowers bloom. A lot of Open Government initiatives here. I’m not going to go over all of them but different topics: crowdsourcing, open data, participation in different ways. Focus on technology. While these are not necessarily Open Government initiatives in themselves, they were definitely part of the Open Government dialogue then. Many of these are still around. A lot of the initiatives we are talking about are still around now.

      I’m going to keep going because we are short on time. Things happening at the state and local government. In the US, state and local governments and Open Government in a lot of areas tend to be lavatories of innovation. New York City obviously didn’t invent participatory budgeting but they brought on participatory budgeting. We have these 311 apps that a lot of cities and small towns are even using to give feedback to their local governments. We heard Austin, Texas joined OGP and a whole lot of state and local level data portals and expansion, and they’re still going. Next slide.

      It’s good to go at the end because we heard everything already. A lot of these initiatives we saw came out of all these different Nation Action Plans. As you heard, we are up to the fifth. The US was the founding member. In 2011, the US receives contrary to process letter for failure to co-create. This has been an ongoing problem with the Nation Action Plan. As Joe introduced the IRM, independent reporting mechanism, I was the IRM researcher for the second Nation Action Plan. It’s a handful but just to say even for that one there was feedback, public participation in feedback, but there wasn’t real meaningful co-creation at that time.

      This leads us to next slide. Where we are now. We heard from Daniel York about the Open Government Secretariat being set up here, and how we hear now, the members of the Advisory Committee, members of the Multistate Stakeholder Forum to more formally co-create commitments for the Nation Action Plan. That gets us up to now so we are no longer in history. Next slide are the readings. And then I think I am done with about 30 seconds to spare. Thank you.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you, Suzanne. We really appreciate that background perspective. Next, I would like to invite Alexis Masterson — GSI to provide a quick timeline overview of the process to develop the sixth US Development Action Plan.

  >> ALEXIS MASTERSON:  I think I am the last speaker before you go into discussions. This will be very quick. Hello, everyone. I am one of the US Open Government Secretariat team members who is working on developing the 6th Nation Action Plan. Next slide please.

      As we’ve mentioned today, the US is currently implementing its 6th Nation Action Plan and that plan expires the end of December, 2024, almost exactly 2 months from today. What we are going to do is we will be following the Open Government partnership guidelines to create NAP 6. The graphic you see here on the slide comes directly from the OGP National Handbook, and it shows the expected timing for plans that — December 31. I want to note where you see it says option two, technically also an option where you can have a plan and that ends on June 30. But we’ve been going with the December 31 date so this will guide our timelines.

      Should also note, as another aside, there are currently the options to have a two-year or four-year plan. Historically, the US has produced two-year plans and, as of right now, we also expect NAP 6 to be another plan.

      Regarding delivery timeline. If you have the end of December in date you are permitted by OGP to deliver your action plan anytime between July 1 of February 28. However, there’s also a rule in the OGP Handbook, and I will read this directly, it’s if a participating government does not deliver a new action plan within one year after the completion of their previous action plan, they will be officially late.

      Because we need at the time to establish this Federal Advisory Committee to have co-creation, also just in light of the fact there’s about to be a political transition, the decision was made to really take advantage of that full possible gap year. So, targeting NAP 5 ends December this year, we will target to have NAP 6 produced and published December 2025.

      Perfect. The slide will show the specifics of our tentative, not set in stone NAP 6 development timeline. The graphic at the top of the six gears also comes from the OGP National Handbook. Thank you to Joseph and — it has six steps to a NAP development process. We have mapped the six steps to what we believe the most reasonable timeline is for producing NAP 6 December 2025.

      The first three steps: the blue, red, and silver analyzing inputs, defining the problem in identifying solutions, is all taking place right now and will continue through the end of this calendar year. As part of these three parts of the process, we are engaging with agencies, the public, and various meetings, and we also have — we’ve released a request for information, train together, ideas and information, taking place now.

      Hopefully out of that we will get a fairly good sense of what areas of priority for focus should be which will lead us into the drafting phase. That is that orange bar that goes from January through the end of May 2025. After that, we have the bright blue bar. That goes from June until the end of September 2025. That is where we expect that there’s going to be a good solid draft of NAP 6. Will be able to share that with the public and get feedback and have an interactive process there. We will really get feedback from all stakeholders, of course, including yourselves.

      As a slight aside, you will see that the blue maps to recent response, the fifth gear. I do want to emphasize that is not going to be the only point in the process where there is dialogue between government and civil society and agencies. There are going to be opportunity for everyone to engage throughout the entire process. For instance, three winds are immediately responding to — attending meetings that we have and later on when we have the NAP 6 draft, folks can respond and provide their feedback to that draft.

      There will also be times when the government provides recent responses. I think we will try to followed the Canada model, giving feedback throughout the process. That leads us to the green. That’s when we hope to finalize and publish NAP 5 during the October-November 2024 timeline. I’ve of course mentioned NAP 6 as to December 2025, and we are building in some buffer time which is reflected by the gray bar in December 2025 — we don’t know what could happen then. We want to leave a little bit of wiggle room in case there are delays for any reason that’s unexpected. With that very quick overview I’m happy to take questions. If there are none, I will yield the time back.

  >> SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI:  Hi, Suzanne. Can you put the timeline back up? Thank you for this. I’m visual so this really helps me. I know you’re getting feedback along the way and I appreciate you saying that, and I heard that, but what’s up here in the January to May, I’m thinking about the work between the Federal Advisory Committee and at the Secretariat to drafting this. Maybe this is what we need to think through about what priorities we have — early enough. Obviously, next June is going to be too late to give more formal input. We need to have input sooner in the process to help develop the actual commitments. I don’t know if that’s something we need to think through. I’m sorry, that’s not really a question as much as a statement. Do you have an idea of how that would go, that the advisory committee would be given real input earlier on in the process?

  >> ALEXIS MASTERSON:  I think you answered your question well enough. That’s something for the committee to figure out. Will have the Secretariat here helping to create dialogue and feedback between other parts of society and with agencies. Agencies have to have a substantial amount of buy-in. But in terms of how you’re going to structure yourselves to come up with priorities and areas that you would want to recommend NAP focus on, we will leave that to you.

  >> SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI:  I’m thinking out loud but if the commitment to be drafted in January, are we going to early on, like really on, now major themes that we want to be working on to direct or at least with the agencies on what our priorities would be. I think that’s something we need to think about.

  >> ALEXIS MASTERSON:  I think that’s perfect way to be thinking about it.

  >> KRISTEN HONEY:  Kristin. I want to follow up on what Suzanne said. I like the idea of meetings and we have public comment from January to June. I think they did get hub and allowed there to be draft commitments from civil society. Other technology platforms at GSA, and the support here could help us with that we could open up through technology to have external groups, commitments if we get a structured format about commitments would look like.

  >> ALEXIS MASTERSON:  I do not know off the top of my head what is available in terms of GSA. To your point, other technologies have been used in the past. I think at least one person submitted a response to RFI that makes a specific recommendation for a toll. That’s something we can look at to gather fraud ideas.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you. That was a very informative session. I just want to make sure before we close that out that there were no questions online for Alexis concerning NAP 6? Were good? Thank you. Finally, our last speaker before we have our public oral comments. I would like to pass it back to our chair, Daniel Schuman, to lead the committee discussion on how they would like to organize the committee. As Danny makes his way to the microphone, I will ask the members to take a seat in the front of the stage. I’ll come down and join you as well.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Testing. Okay. That was a lot, right? That was really good. I get to the presenters. That was very helpful. During my remarks, I kind of alluded to two challenges, and I think you can see from the presentation we just saw that an aspect of other challenges might be timing. We don’t have to necessarily align ourselves with the process for the Secretariat, but I think it makes sense to try to sync up with what they’re doing so that we can actually end up tying to that process. We also aren’t — only doing the open there’s another set of charters. When I spoke before, one thing was about the timeline. The other was about how do we get started so we can buy the plane and build it at the same time.

      Where we should start with, I think is the timeline. I had suggested that we have a convening — sorry, that we have a preparatory meeting — three preparatory meetings between now and when we have the next full committee meeting. Preparatory means you can’t have deliberations, but there’s a lot of information together. We saw from OGP is they have a lot of resources that might be useful. I was looking at some of it recently where these are how you could establish a rubric. I think that what may make sense is to have folks break into three preparatory groups between now and the next meeting and with Arthur’s help, I’ll send out emails to find out your preferences, so folks can do research to examine these things. From a planning perspective, we will need to have a full committee meeting in December. We will pick three dates and you can pick from those three dates, January and February, just because you can see we are up against that timeframe and it’s challenging.

      There’s another set of challenges with forming subcommittees and we will talk about that in a minute. Remember, I said this is going to be weird. I just want to get a sense from those in the room and from those online – hi, those online — does this generally make sense? Are folks comfortable or are there concerns with having preparatory meetings? Does it make sense initially to have those?

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Three times? One in December and January and February?

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  One is that there will be — we would all get together in December and virtually in January and February. Between now and that December meeting, a subset, no more than six of us get together for one of three topics. If you are really interested in participation, you can help your research on that. If you’re really interested in committee structure you can get together on that. We would just have people do some of the initial research so that when we come back, we can have an informed discussion like what happened today. Is this plausible, impossible for folks?

  >> DR. SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI:  I think if you don’t have too much overlap — were you calling them working meetings?

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Preparatory meetings.

  >> DR. SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI:  I think you can have all three meet between now and December, as long as there’s not a lot of — well, if someone wants to be on all three, they can.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  That’s my intention. Can’t have more than six people on it because it becomes a quorum if there’s a quorum there’s a whole bunch of other things that can be triggered. Going to turn to Arthur in a minute and he will explain some of the constraints we have in terms of how we operate. I was thinking of basically dividing into thirds. One third will work on one thing and one third will work on another and then one third another, and we can come back and share what we found. Are there public — is there a public comment? Somebody online? Who was it? Josh, go ahead.

  >> DANIEL YORK: Josh made a comment online so let me read it aloud. Josh says is a preliminary matter can we consider adopting a timeline, at least in principle. Support the chairs proposal to proceed with preliminary meetings prior to the subsequent discussion.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Let me do it this way. Is there any objection at this point? We good? In that case, I’m going to turn it to Arthur just for a minute before opening it up for discussion. Arthur, there’s a bunch of regulations and experience that we need to operate under. Can you talk about them a little bit in terms of what we can and can’t do in these preparatory meetings, and also just generally, the timeline said that are involved. One thing we were looking at is establishing subcommittees, putting up notices for upcoming meetings, a lot of stuff that has to happen, and you are the one unfortunately that has to do it. Can you talk about?

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Sure. This is Arthur Brunson, the DFO. One of the things that Dan is making mention to is we will have — are looking to have a meeting in December. Internally, within my office at GSA, it takes roughly about 30 days to publish to have improved and notice. There’s a lot of things that have to happen in the background, which is why we are talking about our December and January and February meetings, because that will allow me to put those notices out and start working on them now in preparation for that. One of the other areas that we were discussing is doing subcommittees and working groups, whatever we call it, and that requires an appointment by the GS administrator we met earlier today. I’m sure she’ll be eager to sign our packages and do what needs to be done, but that’s a process that is not a one-step process that will probably take anywhere from 30 to 90 days to get through that process.

      What I’m hoping we are going to be able to do is be very deliberate about the subcommittees we are thinking about creating, because if we create one and then decide we need to focus on something else, then we go through the whole process again. The more thoughtful we are about what we’re doing, the better. As Daniel mentioned, we are allowed to have preparatory meetings. With those preparatory meetings, as Daniel mentioned already, we can’t have a quorum. As part of that meeting, if we do, we need to follow the same process that we would follow with a regular meeting or a full meeting. Here at GSA, just keep in mind that the rules and other agencies are not necessarily all the same, within GSA even our subcommittees require the same process as our full meetings. We would have to put a registry notice out for those. Whoever’s the chair for the subcommittees, has to attend all of those meetings, as well as one of the DFO is. For those who may not remember, Dan York is our alternate DFO. So, one of us needs to be at every meeting and, whoever the chair is of that meeting, the subcommittees can’t operate in theory on its own. It won’t make decisions; it will present its findings to the full committee. Does that cover mostly what we were thinking?

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  That’s great. The upshot of all of this is if we want to create subcommittees and we can, once you’re on one — if you want to go — if you want to change the purpose or if you want to have a meeting of the full committee or the subcommittee, it’s 30 days basically from when you — okay, we should meet and we pick a date to go through and put it in the Federal Register, you come up with the agenda, and it has to be publicly available for 50 days, there’s a whole thing involved. That’s why am taking up time today to do this, if we can get started, it means we can set up a cadence of full committee meetings. We have the preparatory group that can make recommendations for the subcommittees, that would make sense. That would make sense so that when we meet again in a month or six weeks, we can get started what we want the subcommittee to be about. If we approve it somewhere first, and it takes two or three months, and we’re going to have a new administration, so who knows what that’s going to look like. It’s just an involved process. Like I said, we are not tied to the timeline that NAP 6 has, we can do it as we think makes sense. But if we want to be sort of in that timeframe, we gotta get going, which is why I’m pushing for more stuff now instead of the way I would normally do it, having more time to get to know each other. Thoughts, comments, concerns?

  >> KIRIL JAKIMOVSKI: My question would be recognizing — trying to stay out in front of this development timeline for this next action plan and trying to be able to provide agencies with meeting substantive ideas about the priorities in order to get this going in a reasonable amount of time. I’m wondering what the benefit of that immediate process would be in setting up these formal subcommittees versus kind of proceeding with these informal preparatory committees, as far as just trying to get on schedule at this front end. To your point, earlier you mentioned there’s a lot within the mandate of this fact that’s not immediately relevant to the OGP process, and I’m wondering if the committees will be more timely. I’m recognizing we are in a time crunch and trying to get these ideas moving.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  I can answer. If other folks want to tag onto that point before we go on.

  >> CORINNA TURBES:  Hi, Corinna with the Data Foundation, If you establish a formal subcommittee, is there a minimum threshold of the amount of meetings? Let’s say, for example, we have a subcommittee established, we have to have so many meetings or anything like that?

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Arthur can talk about this better than I can.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  I was going to just answer with, no. There is not a minimum set of meetings for the subcommittee.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  There’s a whole bunch like have to write a charter — once you put members on it, then if you want to change it then that something.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  If you’re changing it, they would have to be appointed.

  >> BOBAK TALEBIAN:  Bobby Talebian with the Department of Justice. I was just thinking the biggest advantage of subcommittees is the whole committee doesn’t have to come together. It seems like — after hearing all of this, it seems like that’s the only advantage.

  >> SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI:  Question. Can you have external groups like subcommittees, you get expertise from organizations and experts that may not be on the committee?

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  We could have that and add them to a subcommittee. Would limit that process to going out to 90 days because they would have to be appointed, and that process of going through the ethics and legal review would start over for them as it happened with you guys. So, if we are having — if we’re using the members already on the committee, that process would be a little shorter. But there is nothing precluding us from inviting them or asking me to have them invited to come in and talk to everybody.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  That’s my hope. One of the things I hope to do is there are people who are experts not on this committee that I would love to have come in and talk to the full committee or subcommittee so that we can get the benefits of their expertise. To a point, informally would be a thing. We didn’t answer your question. Did we?

So, the benefits of the preparatory meetings? There’s a whole terminology thing. The reason is while we can’t deliberate, we can get it going now so that when we come and meet as the full committee, have our deliberations; we could have the benefit of the preparatory work and still have everybody together at the same time as just a subgroup. I had thought about trying to do some of these things today that we are talking about — the meeting would have been never ending, would’ve just been too much. Other thoughts?

  >> STEVEN KULL:  Can you hear me? I just want to underscore that I think it’s really valuable for us to have input into the NAP 6 and make that a real priority in the first months, and will get is oriented to the bigger long-term issues. I think there are important ways that the US — in certain areas related to public participation which is the area and must engage in — that the US is kind of behind the eight ball. There are things happening in other countries. I think it would be very valuable for us to come up to speed on those issues.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  I think that’s great. One thing I would like to do is to have presentations from folks who – including one of our members here – who are keyed into what’s been successful internationally so we can bring that back and learn from that benefit from that. That’s a great intervention. Thank you for that. Other thoughts?

  >> ADE ODUTOLA:  Ade Odutola with Solvitur Systems, are there any restrictions on the preparatory groups, the number that can be on them?

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Yes. I was thinking that we would have 15ish people; three groups of five, and I would appoint myself to one of them.

  >> DR. SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI:  Suzanne. I think it makes sense to have a preparatory meeting, if that’s what it is, to consider having a subcommittee or subcommittees. Right now, I don’t know. I’d say let’s go ahead and do some research and then decide in our next meeting.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  I can do it without a meeting to create preparatory meetings.

  >> DR. SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI:  That’s what I mean. Let’s go ahead and have a preparatory meeting on if we should have subcommittees.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  That’s right. Great point. Let me get details because that is one of the things. The three preparatory meetings, one would be on evaluation, one will be on engagement and one would be on structure. The evaluation one does, and I share this, but I will go over it since everyone may not have seen it – for the evaluation one, look at research to conduct research on the ideas we want to include. The idea of the government partnership has a rubric or bunch of rubrics that they use. I have put together a bunch of ideas of how do we decide what’s in and what’s out. This isn’t deciding what’s in and what’s out, but do we have a spreadsheet, give things weights, what does this look like? One of the ideas I have listed where stuff — like does this actually relate to government? Is there an authorized agency to do this? Is it a practice being poorly implemented? These are the types of things that the preparatory meeting folks would look at. They would say these are the resources and how we do this type of evaluation. I’m going to share our findings with a full committee when we meet in December as to, one, does it make sense to have a rubric? If it doesn’t, we are wasting our time. If it does make sense, what are the examples and what things should we include? That would be the first of the three preparatory meetings.

      The second would be on engagement. This is in part — like we are The Open Government Federal Advisory Committee, we need to be open in how we are doing what we are doing, but open means a lot of things. How much time do we let for public comments at these things? Should it be five minutes, or an hour, or a separate meeting? I don’t want to answer that question, it’s these folks’ job to figure that out. Do we respond to public comments? I don’t know how to respond to that either. How do we share comments? There’s a whole bunch of questions that this group would be responsible for, that this group would be responsible for starting to think through.

      The final one, and I will go to comments online, is the committees question. One question on that is should there be subcommittees. Should they be thematic or should they be functional or should they be something else? I don’t know the answer to that, either. That would be a great thing for the preparatory meeting to start to look at. International examples are trying to think through — we don’t know the answer now, so we will kick the ball down the road, or do we have some ideas and we can get started. That’s what I’m thinking for the three preparatory meetings. I can see Janice signaling that someone online has a comment. John. Okay, please. Josh, go ahead.

  >> JOSH TAUBERER: I have two things. For the first group, I think it’s a very big scope. I wanted to go back to Kristin’s suggestion at the very beginning, what is actually the scope of this group and what are our goals? It might be good to down scope that group just to think about what’s really in scope of what we’re trying to accomplish.

      The second thing I wanted to say is it seems like we have limited time to deliberate. These groups would be especially helpful to do as much work as possible before we actually get back together. I have a question, procedural question, can the groups do analysis? Are we just gathering information or can we actually put together a set of possible recommendations for the group as a whole to consider when we all reconvene? Can those groups also serve as a clearinghouse for the whole committee, because I think we probably all are going to have some opinions about how to scope the group. For all three groups, everybody’s going to have thoughts.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  I think this is an Arthur question. I have some notions.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you, Josh. This is Arthur at DFO. One point of clarification before we move forward. All of the preparatory meetings that Dan is speaking of – Daniel — you would all volunteer for them and Daniel would not be able to appoint himself, he would volunteer to be on whichever one he wants to be on. Going back to the question of having the preparatory meetings and doing analysis and how would that work. As long as if you are doing analysis as an individual and not as a group deliberating on it, then you can provide your recommendations, thoughts, analysis, just not as a deliberated group while you’re in the preparatory stage. When you make a decision or if you make a decision to become a committee or subcommittee then that would be different.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Someone has a comment? Sorry, I thought there was a comment for a moment.

  >> JOHN DIERKING:  Some of the questions have already been answered. The bylaws contemplate subcommittees that are silent — structuring subcommittees. Provided the Chair recommends the appointment of an OGS FAC number with can spurn interest. We talked about that in consultation with the BFO for — by the administrator. Preparatory meetings confirmed by the chair seem to be a reasonable way to proceed. My question is are the public notice agenda requirements for the prep meetings as would be required for the subcommittee meetings? I apologize if I missed that.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  This is Arthur. The answer to your question is no.

  >> JOHN DIERKING:  Thank you.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Thank you. Other thoughts? Other questions, either high-level or the three preparatory meetings or three types of preparatory meetings I suggested? Are there any other thoughts or comments that folks would like to raise?

  >> DR. SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI: I think you said we could volunteer ourselves and others would be assigned. Say we get ideas for one we are not assigned to; can we email those ideas to you so we don’t get in the way of the subcommittee?

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  That would be a good way to do it. Send it to myself and then we get it to the right group.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  The emails are all — one of the reasons the emails are being DCC’d is because it’s trying to prevent deliberation occurring outside of the public space. Arthur is point of contact for all of this stuff. If you want to disseminate something to everyone, send it to him and he can send it to everyone.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  It works.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  That’s part of the way they transparency works to make sure that deliberation is happening in public. To go back just to answer, I think it was Josh’s question – you can gather information in this preparatory meeting, you can conduct research, identify alternatives, report all those back. Once we are in the group we can make determination as to the approach for deliberation. I know all this is language terminology but that’s what seems to be — other thoughts?

  >> JOSH TAUBERER:  In light of that, I’m thinking maybe the group should make sure that someone is volunteering to do that individual analysis of preparatory group as a whole can’t do. In order for the group to actually be referred out, every group will hopefully choose one or more people, but probably not six people to report back. A good synthesis so we don’t have to spend the whole meeting rehashing all of the research.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Thank you, Josh. That’s right. I think you can do analysis. You can’t deliberate but you can identify the pros and cons of different approaches. I don’t see any reason why I can’t suggest that one of the six people at the preparatory meeting is the person who will report back on behalf of that work, not just at that other people cannot report back as well, but that way would be someone designated to play that role, and then if people have comments across the things, they would be able to report them in advance and also able to comment at the full committee meeting when we would reconvene later on. I know this is a little convoluted. I don’t have anything great to say. I guess at this point – I can do this on my own but I would rather do this – I can see you have a thought.

  >> CHARLES CUTSHALL:  I have a thought but not about preparatory meetings, it’s it just administrative stuff. I heard you say you are planning to have us meet in December and January and March? In the interim, I think this came up, but I don’t remember the answer, is there a reading room where members can share research and resources that they think might be generally helpful, where members can peruse those in their time or where members from the public can share information with? Dan, during his remarks, said that he would share a readout on the RFI. I want to make sure that we accept that offer. I would like to motion that we accept the offer because I’d love a readout on the RFI.

      I also like the persons idea of soliciting and collecting and drafting commitments and those may be commitments for members of the public or also might be commitments that we have ourselves, and is there a way to have a continuous stream or have those come in and we put them somewhere in the parking lot so that maybe we can look at them appropriately, cluster them in accordance with whatever structure we come up with, an chart to review those things — not lose track of them?

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Three great points I will take in order. One is the Open Government Secretariat item. I don’t see why we can’t have a spot on the website, although it takes time to get things on the website where you link to other sources to be publicly available. Is that what you’re thinking? Publicly available? If that doesn’t work, we keep a page on my GitHub account and we keep things there, too. You guys will tell me if you can do that.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  I wanted him to finish his thoughts and make sure we respond.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Open Government Secretariat, is it possible for us to have a webpage on the Open Government Secretariat, where we can post items that people have researched that we want to share with each other or the public?

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  So, I think Dan is probably going to direct me to we should get back to you with that question; however, I think we also already presented a solution that if you send whatever it is that you were interested in being sure to be, I’m able to send it to each of the individuals, so that would be one way to make that happen.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  When you do the things that are relevant — you go online also?

  >> CHARLES CUTSHALL:  I’ll jump in. I don’t know if this is the case for anyone here in the room, online or here, but email is the bane of my existence. I absolutely hate it. At one point I think it was a brilliant idea but at this point in time there have to be other ways of sharing information with people. While I truly appreciate your offer to man the OG fact in box and send it out to people, I just think that — I hope that we’re up into a different way of sharing information with each other.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Will come back to that one because that will take us sideways. It’s a good point.

  >> SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI:  Just one thing. I’m glad you’re going to investigate it and get back to us. It would be really interesting if we could do an Open Government sandbox and put things on there with all the qualifiers that this isn’t government endorsed non-government resources. I’m guessing putting it on government website will be harder but if we could somehow bound it – I don’t know what you would call it — but the disclaimers, all the disclaimers in the world so we are radically transparent in working in real-time so the public can take in their optics that we aren’t endorsing those things.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  I will just point out that one of the things that we will be concerned about is if there are comments being shared and that will give the appearance of deliberation prior to the full committee meeting, and that will put us in trouble with the law. But we talked about what we were able to do as far as sharing but we will definitely do more research and get back to you.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Are folks comfortable with interfacing with the Secretariat to manage the — I’ll work it out with Dan and Arthur and get back to everyone. Is that cool?

  >> DANIEL YORK:  I might offer that the Federal Registry does exactly that. The public makes comments that’s available to everyone including members. DR 5 is currently out there for NAP 6. Folks wanted to make public comments, that would be a great way. As comments come in, they are publicly posted. As long as they meet the posting guidelines.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  There are two other things: one was the RFI, and I think that of course it would make sense to hear from the secretary in terms of what they are recommending with respect from the RFI. Of course, I could be wrong. Folks disagree. I will be talking with all of you to come up with ideas for the agenda for December and January and February and so on. Arthur will send an email at my request asking for agenda items and we will collaboratively but that agenda together. One of the things that should be on there that I think would make sense is — from the Secretariat. Do you folks have any concerns with that? Any concerns online? We are good?

      The final one was draft commitment. I think that goes into the rubric question. Part of that is figuring what’s in and what’s out and categorizing it. I think those two things connect. Maybe not?

  >> CHARLES CUTSHALL:  I like the idea — maybe not. I do like the idea of maybe doing an open ended RFI. I don’t even know if an open ended RFI is a thing with the Federal Register and have it on .gov, a space where members of the public, we ourselves can share research. During the presentation earlier there was reference to recent research paper that came out of the partnership for Public service, that should be something readily available and accessible to all of us, and we shouldn’t have to hear about it and learn about it and go out and search for it. You can use that same vehicle in the notice to say if you have things on an ongoing basis that you want to share with the OG FAC with — go to regulations.gov and drop it here and it will be here for them to come and look at in their own time.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  That’s great. For the second thing we had the OG FAC Chair email address, we can continue to encourage people

[LOSS OF AUDIO]

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Yes, I’m not checking my cell phone at the moment. Sorry. I hope you were not off for too long.

  >> PARTICIPANT:  We think you are off.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  For just a moment? For those of you who are online and may of missed, where we ended up on three things: one, we will see if we can have the secretary come and talk about the RFI. We are going to address the reading room question in two different ways: one for public comments. People can always email FAC, we will talk with the secretary to see if it can be hosted on the government website and if not, we will figure out another way. Draft comments can be sent to the ogfac@gsa.gov email address at any point now and in the future for recommendations that people have as we go forward.

      I’m suggesting we have preparatory meetings. I don’t think there are any concerns with this approach. If there are any concerns with this approach, whether in person or online, now is a good time to make yourself heard; otherwise, going to go ahead and do that. Arthur will send an email asking which things you would like to be on and I will go and help and make sure that we end up with three groups of five people, not counting myself.

  >> SUZANNE PIOTROWSKI:  I have one comment on the preparatory meetings idea. The topics that you suggested for evaluation, engagement, and structure. I wanted to look through the lens of the deliverables. We are hoping the OG FAC Chair will do over the next two years — does everything fit within one of those three? Are we or fitting anything by having those categories?

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  We are. I think we or fitting the things that are not relevant to the Open Partnership, at least to some extent, but we don’t have to do that immediately. I’m just sort of parking that for the moment because I want to make sure that we can celebrate and we can get comments. I want to get that part knocked out and make sure – at least the committees as it relates to the Open Government partnership — the scope is not limited, so folks can recommend whatever they want or suggest whatever they want, but I want to get that immediately going and then circle back with the other stuff. You’re missing some things.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Dan, I would like to recommend that for each one of those meetings that you are making reference to, that we create a questionnaire form that we send out, and that way if someone is interested in the three areas, you can say identify which areas you are interested in and we can set it up from there.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  That’s perfect. Is there any objections in the room or online? Okay. Arthur and I will take care of this. After the meeting today we will get it going. Those are the two things that we really need to address, was the timeline, making sure people are comfortable with that, and preparatory meeting so people were comfortable with that. They’ll be an invitation going out with three choices for the December meeting so that we’ll try to accommodate as many people as possible. It’s going to be a virtual meeting, not in person, in part because hybrid meetings are a challenging format. At some point, I understand we will try to get everybody in DC, that is not something we can do in the moment but something we can do later on.

      Are there other matters of business that folks would like to raise at this time?

  >> STEVEN KULL:  Do you have any idea when the DC in-person meeting will be?

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  I don’t know that. Arthur, do you have any sense of that?

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  At this moment, we do not. As soon as we are aware of when we will have those meetings, you will be the first to know right after the meeting.

  >> STEVEN KULL:  Advance notice is appreciated.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  We will make sure as far ahead as humanly possible so that everybody who wants to be there is able to be there.

  >> KIRIL JAKIMOVSKI:  This is Kiril. I’m just wondering, looking ahead at the sort of pace of meetings from here through the winter, if it’s a viable or possible to meet in November, recognizing its particularly late in the month, the last one or two days, and recognizing people are probably going to be busy around that week. That still gives us like 3 1/2 or almost 4 weeks of time in November, if you want to try to get the preparatory meetings and at the beginning of the month and reconvene in the second half at some point just so that we can keep things moving.

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Between now and the December meeting, there will be three preparatory meetings for each of the groups. If the groups need to have more than one, that is something that the five or so people can figure out for themselves. Fortunately, I don’t have to schedule the preparatory meetings, so there may be more than one. They’ll be one between — what’s today’s date – October 23 – there will be preparatory meetings at that time but we won’t do a full meeting because the committee has a 30-day thing.

      Anyone online? Any interventions? Okay, in that case, thank you all. Going to head back to Arthur.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  I just want to say thank you to the committee for this discussion. The members in the room, please feel free to go back to your seats in the front and we will move into oral comments and public comments, and I will be inviting them up to the podium. I’m going to walk up there.

      Again, thank you committee for this discussion. The members in the room have already moved back to their seats. We will now begin the public oral comments portion of our meeting. For those giving public comments in the room, please line up in this order at the microphone, at the bottom of the stage. For those online, be ready to unmute when it’s your turn to speak. Everyone providing oral public comments, please begin by stating your name and if applicable, your organization you represent.

      Also, keep an eye on the three-minute countdown timer, whether in Zoom or in the room. At the end of your time, please step aside properly to allow the next speaker to begin. The screen now shows the order of those who signed up to provide a three-minute oral public comment. With that, let’s begin. Our first speaker is Dr. Dwight Sanders. Please go ahead our next speaker is Stephen Buckley. If you’re online, please go ahead.

  >> STEPHEN BUCKLEY: Yes, thank you very much. I’m with the US chapter of the international Association for public participation. IAP 2. Quick plug. Spectrum participation, which was created by IAP 2 in 1998 is undergoing a review. If anyone has any thoughts about this widely recognized —, how it can be improved, they can go to IAP2spectrum.com and make comments before the end of the month. I’m sorry I came in late so can only give general comments, but I thought I caught something about regular meetings, and that is very well appreciated. That used to be the case in earlier administrations. I think the idea of interagency working group so that we can talk with different people from Open Government contacts at the various agencies can provide some participation and collaboration about what’s going on. It might’ve been done during the Obama administration but it has not been done since. If we can go back to that, that would be great, particularly with the department of transportation, which I attended a webinar yesterday about meaningful public engagement and how they are trying to make the infrastructure program and projects go much faster. One of those things, the danger is they will try to cut out public engagement and public involvement in decision-making projects that affects people’s lives. I don’t see a timer here, Mr. Brunson, so how much time do I have?

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you, Mr. Buckley, for your comment. Next, we will hear from Rob Martin. Rob, are you there?

  >> ROB MARTIN: I’m speaking on behalf of the — or Lennix Foundation project that supports global open-source software projects and specifications. — has over 28,000 members from every industry and geography to manage the value of cloud technology investments. We facilitate data-driven — cloud and data centers and licenses. Transparency and visibility and technology cost data is important in the US government and globally. I wanted to introduce to the committee a project that I think so could significantly enhance the transparency the efficiency of this data exchange and that is the — open cost and focus. Open billing specification for cloud data and other technology vendor data. Supported by the major cloud providers now and has been around for a couple of years and provides billing data in a standardized format that makes it easier to consolidate and ingest. We provide a lot of clarity and consistency in reporting and allows organizations to use it and manage and share knowledge or cost across vendors and platforms which means agencies can analyze your spending or effectively, promote accountability, and ensure tax dollars are being used efficiently.

  Given the outdated acquisition regulations or technology purchasing of the US, I think it’s a promising solution for ahead a lot of agencies have and — a wide variety of resellers that provide a lot of data if at all. Focused on standardized data — regardless of the cloud and technology they sell and just adopting it would eliminate the need for the government to develop its own specification providing much needed relief and hopeful path forward among procurement processes that desperately need updating. The focus one data release was announced this past June and immediately adopted by Google, cloud, Oracle, cloud adoption by a dozen other vendors focuses not just for government. The project has nearly 100 members. Companies like Walmart and Capital One etc., everybody that you’ve heard of. Many of them have supported development continuously since it started in early 23. Focus also has support in the government here. The recent — the European Parliament has already established Focus — is it standard from for data exchange between member countries. There’s a global support and opportunity for industry and government to work together to fix the systemic problem and to empower agencies to make better decisions. For taxpayers, it’s a government more supportive and practical. I would urge the committee to champion the adoption of focus on the US government and in sharing information with others for — and I’m happy to provide any other information as desired. Thank you.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you, Mr. Martin. Next, we will hear from Colin McNamara.

  >>: COLIN MCNAMARA: We are based in the heart of Texas, and have nearly hundred members who are committed to learning in the upper — every person contrasts the system affecting their daily lives. [reading text very fast – indiscernible by captioner]. We align with goals — government information reading mission accessible following Open Government principles per our focus upbringings transparency to AI in public processes while ensuring the tabulation has access to tools to use government information and actively participate and hold institutions accountable. Government information is often too late or incomplete and arriving just days before crucial meetings and during marginal marginalized groups from effectively — for example, encrypt withheld until the last minute and communities are left without enough time to engage respond creating balance of power. As AI becomes embedded in our government the risk of — growth spurt without visibility of how AI models work the public risks losing — to address this we did transparency encode binding agents. The biases and models I reference. City state and Federal levels. We need open-source tools from the backboard of equitable AI development and our group is actively building. These tools bridge digital device answering crucial information is accessible in both human and machine-readable formats. Thankfully, the AI system that’s out here now includes things like etc. — other open-source platforms and tools. These examples are not limited to just these examples but represent a robust and growing ecosystem that provides the foundation for building transparent AI systems. We can create AI systems that interact transparently with AI data by using these tools. Our hope is to the Open Government initiatives that the purchasing members can significantly enhance government transparency and promote equitable access. It is equally important the public has access to the tools themselves by providing access and training we can empower individuals to take meaningful actions. With the six Open Government Nation Action Plan, we have an unprecedented opportunity to promote transparency at a deeper level. This means ensuring that the code for agents — weights and models are openly accessible. Transparency in these elements is not technical necessity but fundamental to a functioning democracy. Thank you.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you, Mr. McNamara. Next, we will hear from Sue —. Not online? Next, we will hear Pedro —.  At this time, we will hear from Alex Howard.

  >> ALEX HOWARD: Thank you so much, Arthur, and thank you to Daniel for accommodating me. It’s a pleasure to see you while virtually. I’m so glad that it’s possible to have a hybrid roundtable like this. This is exactly what I think we all should do, when there was a commitment in the fourth Nation Action Plan, to have a discussion exactly like this one. That didn’t happen for a variety of reasons not least of the global pandemic. I’m grateful to all of you for coming together and celebrate something that is I think an American value. Going back to our founding, the idea to be self-governing public needs information, needs to be able to work with its government that is of the People, to connect with all of you who are serving today.

      Putting a comment into the chat that represents a public comment I submitted in response to the assessment that the GSA put out early this year with respect to US performance. I’ve added another one as well, which is the blueprint for accountability. It was co-created amongst civil society in 2020 and submitted to the Administration for their consideration across a whole range of Open Government areas: transparency participation and collaboration, those traditional pillars. Unfortunately, that was not the basis for the Nation Action Plan. The fifth Nation Action Plan represented the administrations priorities and a deed that was true of the eight that preceded it. It’s my hope that all of you are able to use modern tools to use the extraordinary capacity you have, the people in the room, and the American people distribute it all around the world across the 50 states in six different territories to be able to see your work as you do, to show your work, not just to email buffer using modern collaboration tools, some of which you’ve already mentioned around GitHub, but also collaborative drafting tools that have been developed across branches of government. I’d like you to think why OJP has or has not had a major impact in this Administration or previous ones and to draft commissions like the coalition asked the US government to adopt and new commitments introduced last year. It’s my hope that all of you can bring the voices of the American people in the government by engaging media, through tech companies, through the Internet, far beyond the halls of Washington DC, and reinvigorate the bonds of trust not just between us and our government, but between one another. As you all know, we are struggling right now is a culture to adjust to real-time information and real-time disinformation. Open Government remains the sovereign incident to anticorruption, to lies, to every other aspect of the things that are plaguing us as a nation.

      My hope is that in the days and months and weeks ahead, you’ll all find a way to embrace this — in your work with the press, with the public, and take risk as you reach out online. Thank you for the opportunity to comment virtually. I wish I could’ve been there today. We are all rooting for you on this side of the Hill.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you, Mr. Howard. At this time, we will hear from Mike Gifford.

  >> MIKE GIFFORD: I am, thank you. My name is Mike Gifford. I am the — standards practice lead — listening over the last two hours you have a heavy load ahead of you. In fact, it’s going to have a lot of deliberations ahead of yourselves. I want to add a bit to this and draw out some of the things that you mentioned a few times in passing by other speakers throughout the session. These are things we assume but not [indiscernible by captioner]. Many more government sites globally. I’m also — ACR, a GSA — performance report to introduce more accessibility and performance and to transparency around government contracting. How do we make sure the government is actually buying the goods and services that are the most successful? Section 508. I participated in Open Government partnership and unfamiliar with the movement, and [indiscernible by captioner] is one of the ideas. I would like to see us Open Government investigate digital public goods. Digital public goods are a new printing, a set of new ideas. [indiscernible by captioner]. The framing allows us to go from and focus more on what governments can do to attribute to the global good. How do we make sure that we are positioned so there are folks contributed to the good as opposed to reasoning type of software. Open standards and source and data are opportunities for innovation. They allow for greater transparency and greater collaboration. There’s much more opportunity to evaluate what the process is for implementing effective digital services. It also helps break down the silos within and beyond the Federal governments. United Nations and USAID have embraced digital public goods with other global leaders and set up a digital public goods alliance. This helps — and make sure they align with [indiscernible by captioner]. Having an endorsement from the Federal Advisory Committee would help to increase awareness in the US to this approach in building [indiscernible by captioner] but also help to ensure that having open-source program — [indiscernible by captioner]. If there’s any questions, please let me know.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you, Mr. Gifford. Next, we will hear from Zachary Avento, who is in the room and we will be providing our last comments for today.

  >> ZACHARY AVENTO: Thank you, Arthur. My name is Zach — Avento. I’ve been part of the broader open community since graduating from — community in 2008. Like to thank — I have a somewhat unique perspective having been at presently is on to the support network for WikiLeaks whistleblower, Chelsea Manning, during their trial, and for me over a decade ago. And I’ve also met with the brother of WikiLeaks creator, Julian Assange. I’m glad to hear that Joe John — the first memo to the Constitution of the United States. Ensure that Mr. Schuman remembers our former colleague at the sunlight foundation, Timothy Ball, who infamously pulled a knife on me one day after work and told me to stop supporting WikiLeaks. I have no way of verifying Tim’s claim that he had worked for some kind of red team for the Federal government, but I do know that he went on to work as a senior security engineer at the Hillary Clinton campaign in Brooklyn where he also served as a caretaker for the campaign’s mascot, a dog name Winnie.

  I believe we also have representatives here from the data coalition, which is related to the data coalition I worked to promote the passage of the digital accountability transparency act. The data act of 2014 set a new standard for Federal agencies to report sending information as machine-readable open data. I’m certainly not opposed to the notion of harnessing data to drive our policy decisions but unfortunately in recent years I think we all understand here the government data is faced a real crisis of credibility. I experienced this problem firsthand in the public health sector during the emergence of the COVID 19 virus. I was the director of communications for an organization known as the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care. They received funding from several Federal agencies and the private sector. During this time, I became concerned my employer was pressuring me to publicize inaccurate information. In one instance, for example, it seems that our CEO was grossly exaggerating the impact of that verse on hospitals where we had conducted a survey. My supervisors became increasingly hostile towards me after several attempts to correct these problems internally. In May 2021, my supervisor Kristi Simone made threatening comments to me with regards to some kind of vehicular assault I needed to be concerned about. I felt that the situation had become unsafe, so I resigned the next day. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to retain recording of that conversation. There are many other examples of this kind of harassment. I don’t have sufficient time to describe them all here today. Quite simple, the abuse of power has to stop. I’d be happy to continue to try to provide additional recommendations to the OG FAC Chair going forward. Thank you all so much.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you. At this time, I also want to thank everybody who provided public comments. As we near the end of our event, I would like to invite Kei Koizumi, special assistant to the principal deputy director for science, technology and policy.

  >>KEI KOIZUMI: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Let me begin by congratulating the new Open on this groundbreaking launch. Let me thank also our partners at GSA for their efforts in bringing this committee to life. You are here and I’m very happy about that. I’m pleased to share some closing remarks. They will be short — on behalf of the White House office of technology policy, every probably supported the work of Open Government since 2009 and of Open Government partnerships since 2011.

      I’m Kei, a social scientist, and long engaged in the work of data, government data, and making it more open and transparent for government people. For me the beginning is January 21, 2009, when Pres. Obama issued his memorandum on transparency and Open Government. The Biden administration followed up with an Open Government policy directorate which led of course to the founding of OGP. As many of you know, at OSTP, we work on behalf of the president to maximize the benefits of science and technology to advance health, prosperity, security, environmental quality and justice for all Americans. This includes, as directed by Pres. Obama and reaffirmed by Pres. Biden, supporting the uptick in mainstreaming of Open Government principles and approaches which are so fundamental to our American democratic tradition, using the tools of science and technology policy. The tradition of openness and engagement with the public is one that the United States has continued to build on and expand. From the early days of the Freedom of Information Act, two more recent efforts on the data act and of the evidence act.

  >> We at OSGP are of course also a proud founding member and supporter of Open Government partnership. We are trying to work with all of you in this room and on the online community to make real Pres. Biden’s commitment of harnessing the power of government action to ensure that our democracy delivers for our people. I’m very pleased that over the past 15 years, we’ve seen an expansion of this movement around the country, state one in tribal and territorial leaders are also bridging Open Government practices.

      Since the launch of the Secretariat, recently, now we are at a new phase in this journey, so thank you for taking the initial steps on this journey. You have an ambitious schedule ahead of you. Having worked with several advisory committees, it’s going to be frustrating and it’s going to be challenging, but we are counting on you to really make the links between Open Government and the American people, the stakeholders, all interested people all across the world. So here we are today at the launch of this first ever US The Open Government Federal Advisory Committee. We have a cake? We don’t have a birthday cake?

      I’m really happy that this now stands as a platform for diverse members of civil society and government to collaborate, to share ideas, and provide valuable advice for Federal government open practices into shape action and commitments in their implementation. It’s an enormous achievement today for Open Government in the United States. Let me conclude by thanking GSA administrator, Carnahan, for her leadership and commitment to driving Open Government efforts.

      Since we are over time, going to conclude that by just saying thank you again for your service, the work that you have already done, the work you are about to do, and we’re going to work together to make sure that we enshrine our commitment to our most enduring democratic principles. Thank you so much.

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Thank you. That now brings us to the end of our meeting. Daniel Schuman, would you like to say a few parting words?

  >> DANIEL SCHUMAN:  Thank You

  >> ARTHUR BRUNSON:  Short and sweet like we like it. I would like to echo Daniel’s remarks. Thank you. Thank all of our presenters, attendees and stakeholders for joining us today, including those who provided further comments. Have a great rest of the day and we are adjourned. Thank you.