Programs aim to take advantage of technology to higher inform and have interaction citizens in a variety of topics, from scientific research to budgeting.

The Obama Administration released a second round of open government initiatives, introducing nearly two dozen plans to stimulate or improve the government’s interaction with citizens — from streamlining Freedom of knowledge Act (FOIA) requests to “participatory budgeting” mechanisms allowing citizens to steer public spending projects of their communities.

The Second Open Government National Action Plan (NAP) expands on initiatives from the administration’s first set of open government initiatives, released in September 2011. Those initiatives included improving the functionality of different government websites, including the White House “We the folks” online petition site, Performance.gov, Data.gov, and other open data initiatives throughout government agencies.

Other initiatives launched or expanded by the administration, in accordance with a Dec. 6 post by Nick Sinai, US Deputy CTO, and Gayle Smith, special assistant to the President, include efforts to expand using challenges, incentive prizes, citizen science, and crowdsourcing throughout the government’s Challenge.gov program. The administration also desires to increase crowdsourcing and “citizen science” programs comparable to NASA’s push to encourage amateur astronomers to monitor asteroids and its upcoming third International Space Apps Challenge.

The new national action plan proposes improving FOIA requests by launching a consolidated request portal where citizens can file a request for any agency. It might also standardize on a central core of FOIA regulations and establish common practices across agencies. And it’ll establish best-practices, in use by some agencies around the government, to chop down on backlogs and processing times, which despite prior efforts continue to return under criticism.

[Can government really improve interaction with citizens? Read 25 Ideas To enhance Government — From Citizens.]

Similarly, the White House will create a safety Classification Reform Committee to spot tips on how to decrease on over-classifying documents and usually simplify the classification system. A number of the committee’s tasks would be reviewing and declassifying historical data on nuclear programs. The NAP states that the CIA and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) can have a pilot program for using IT tools to look for unstructured data and automate initial analysis of documents.

In addition to existing financial transparency initiatives, america will join the worldwide Initiative on Fiscal Transparency (GIFT), a global network of governments and non-governmental organizations that targets improved financial transparency and accountability.

The NAP also features a directive for the govt to work with the Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2) initiative, the National League of Cities, and quite a number other groups and cities to start out projects for participatory budgeting, giving citizens the chance to aid decide local investment priorities.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) have been conducting an open-source pilot to make federal regulations easier to read and understand; the NAP is thinking about the aptitude expansion of the pilot program to other agencies.

Open data initiatives was under way for several years. The NAP looks to expand on these initiatives throughout the Global Open Data on Agriculture and Nutrition program and extend the supply of natural disaster-related data during the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s OpenFEMA initiative.

Moving email to the cloud has lowered IT costs and improved efficiency. Discover what federal agencies can learn from early adopters. Also inside the The good Email Migration issue of InformationWeek Government: Lessons from a successful government data site. (Free registration required.)

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