A different look at open government participation

It’s been over a year, and, the evolution of Open Government is in full swing, including the definition of what Open Government is. We all pretty much agree that that OG is about transparency, participation and collaboration, but, what seems to be missing is context. Transparent to who? Participate in what? Collaborate to solve? So far, most of the efforts of the OG community have been focused on raw data sets and dashboards to answer for transparency, feedback collection sites to cover participation and various forms of social media to foster collaboration. Not a bad start, so long as we don’t allow the OG community to claim victory and quit looking for more creative innovations (or definitions of what OG could/should be)

Army launches My.Army.Mil

The U.S. Army is set to launch My.Army.Mil. The site is Army’s “official user-customized homepage featuring Army news, information and media from around the globe.”

From the press release:

After visitors sign-in and authenticate with Google Friend Connect (AIM, Google, Yahoo and OpenID) or AKO (Army Knowledge Online), they will be prompted to add and arrange a series of widgets to suit their specific information needs. Powering these widgets are open source technologies such as JQuery, PHP, MySQL and API integration.

Featured widgets include:

• An All Services widget with feeds from the Army, Air Force, Marines and Navy
• Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube widgets that sync with many Army organizations
• My Army News widget with customized feeds from Commands, Corps, Divisions, Installations, and traditional news sections
• A Features widget highlighting stories of Valor, Army events, history and heritage
• AKO (Army Knowledge Online) widget to log-in to AKO
• Video widget with official Army videos, newscasts and raw footage
• RSS widget that can pull multiple feeds from external sites