February 9th, 2010 | 
The thought of everything and everyone being transparent (especially in government) is rather appealing isn’t it? Well the Department of Homeland Security is stepping in that direction but only for a limited time.
Yesterday it was announced that for the time period between 06 February and 19 March you, John/Jane Q. Public, will be able to participate in a
…new online public engagement tool designed to solicit input from the public on ways to enhance transparency, participation, collaboration and innovation at the Department—part of President Obama’s Open Government Directive.
It’s odd that you only have just over a month to do so as opposed to having this type of initiative always taking place. I’ll admit when I started reading the mentioned piece from DHS about it’s plan I thought it would be great if the Coast Guard did something like this… then I wondered why we haven’t. But making my way over to the site where people are leaving their ideas, openhomelandsecurity.ideascale.com, and I’m reminded why our service hasn’t taken this route. It’s an open forum for naysayers and idiots to cast their ideas of why one thing or another doesn’t work.
Of course this is only my opinion, and I’m make it based off of the idea tank only being open for three days. None the less it’ll be an interesting experiment at the very least- who knows, maybe the Coast Guard could implement something similar.
My question to you is whether or not the practice of letting everyone either give their opinion and/or vote on others opinions is a good thing- especially when it comes to a specific service such as ours?
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