Overview of this Unit

The purpose of Unit 7 is to help students understand what it means to ‘work in the open’ in government, and to explain the many different interpretations and manifestations of ‘openness’ that are applied in modern governments. It attempts to situate digital era notions of openness within a longer historic debate about the value of open vs closed government practices.

This material, developed by 'Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age', has been prepared to help university faculty to add digital era skills to the teaching of Masters in Public Policy and Masters in Public Administration programs. All these materials are based on our eight Digital Era Competencies - this unit corresponds closely to Competency 6.

This unit is one of eight units that make up a full semester course. The units have also been designed to be used by educators independently, without students taking the rest of the course. This unit can be taught in either one or two classes.

This Unit's Learning Outcomes

Learning Outcome 1

By the end of Unit 7 students will be able to explain why governments have traditionally been closed, and what motivated this. A non-exhaustive list of reasons includes:

Protecting confidences
Concerns about security
Power and control
Avoiding muddled lines of accountability

Learning Outcome 2

By the end of Unit 7 students will be able to distinguish modern methods of working in the open from more traditional forms of transparent government, and from closed work.

Traditional forms of transparency: Official statistics, parliamentary records, maps.
Digital era forms of transparency: Blogs, open data, GitHub code repositories.
Closed forms of government: Official secrets, cryptography, security services.

Learning Outcome 3

By the end of Unit 7 students will be able to Identify situations in which working in the open creates value, and where it doesn't.

Learning Outcome 4

By the end of Unit 7 students will be able to explain some steps that a government team could take to work more in the open, and the barriers they may expect to face.

Learning Outcome 5

By the end of Unit 7 students will be able to differentiate the concept of openness that is used by most digital government teams from concepts of participation and co-creation that have evolved from other traditions.

Summary of Key Arguments in this Unit

Argument 1 - The digital era has seen the rise of new ways for public servants to share information, code and stories of research and implementation. Governments are starting to experiment with these.