Competency 6 of 8 - Openness

“A digital-era public service leader can use a range of techniques and tools to make government more open, collaborative, and accountable."

Background to this competency

The steady progress of improved governance has long been connected with openness and transparency. Transparency is a key method by which citizens can both access government and ensure that the government leviathan serves the public good, for example through the use of Freedom of Information laws or the publication of official statistics.

As core ideals, openness, collaboration and accountability are not new, but the digital revolution has brought new ways of realising these ideals, making information of all kinds easier to access.

But there are also major new risks to these ideals. Public leaders in a digital era need to understand how new technologies can advance or set back the ideals of openness, collaboration and accountability.

Emerging practices that manifest ideals of openness in new, digital ways include:

Writing blog posts or recording videos to tell stories about users and processes;
Publishing data and code in public repositories for others to reuse; or
Making project management plans open via online project management tools

However, new technologies bring threats to openness and accountability, including:

'Bit rot' where old data on government activities is lost by accident (when paper records would have survived)
The omnipresent risk of accidentally revealing sensitive data through openness
Informal collaborative systems such as open source projects or wikis can be vulnerable to systematic biases

While transparency and accountability are ideals about which many people feel strongly, it is easy to miss a separate but equally important motivation that drives modern public servants to adopt new approaches to openness.

Many public servants now embrace tools like blogging, open data and open source code for entirely pragmatic reasons. Various forms of working in the open are adopted to help recruit or attract talent and share critical information in a low cost or scalable manner. These pragmatic uses help create public value and help significantly reduce the internal transaction costs of sharing information, data or code with other teams or other governments. So teams often open themselves up in the hope that others will do the same, making everyone's working lives fundamentally more convenient. This now happens even at highly secretive part of the state, like Britain's GCHQ.

Meaning of this competency

Modern public service leaders need to be familiar with a range of different approaches that teams and civil servants use to work in the open, and they need to be able to select which approach is right in which situation. However, they also need to be able to make sophisticated decisions about the trade-offs between making things public, and making them private.

This means being aware not only of classic issues of state security, but more modern issues of data protection and digital security, which could be compromised by careless forms of openness. Furthermore it means understanding economic issues: how greater openness can drive economic innovation, lower transaction costs inside government and encourage greater accountability by civil society.

Why was this competency developed and agreed?

Our list of eight Digital-Era Competencies is designed to sit alongside current, existing competencies often taught in schools of public administration or public policy. All eight of our competencies therefore represent capabilities that are either not being taught to current and future public servants or that require some updating to succeed in the digital era.

This particular competency was included to ensure that we did not teach public leaders how to build a sophisticated digital state that is opaque and impenetrable to the people who live under it. Not only is working in the open crucial for driving up project speed and quality, it is an important modern piece of real accountability.

Furthermore, openness has emerged as a critical, practical tool to allow public servants to design and deliver public goods and policies.

Reading Suggestion

Smith, Paul: Doing the Hard Work to Make Things Open. GDS Blog, March 2017

Dekker, R., & Bekkers, V. (2015). The contingency of governments' responsiveness to the virtual public sphere: A systematic literature review and meta-synthesis. Government Information Quarterly, 32(4), 496-505.

Mergel, I. (2015). Open collaboration in the public sector: The case of social coding on GitHub. Government Information Quarterly, 32(4), 464-472.