On President Obama’s first day in office, he released a memo calling for “an unprecedented level of openness in Government” and increased “transparency, public participation, and collaboration.” After one year, has the impact of the use of technology for open government been substantive or inconsequential?

The recent disclosure of a confidential Congressional document has at least one congressman calling for a ban on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software, but a closer look at the problem reveals that this effort would merely be treating the symptoms, not the disease.

In the digital world a decade is a long time, yet federal government websites are using the same restrictive policy on “cookies“—small data files stored on a user’s computer—established during the Clinton administration. In this report, ITIF looks at the origins of this federal government policy, the current uses of persistent cookies, and proposes a new framework for the use of persistent cookies on government websites given current trends in e-government. The goal, ITIF argues, should be to loosen the restrictions on the use of cookies and balance privacy against other equally important goals such as usability, accessibility and transparency.

The first two waves of the IT revolution offered state and local IT leaders amazing opportunities to make government more efficient, improve services and increase transparency. Today, an emerging third wave is making it possible for governments to solve pressing public problems in fundamentally new ways.

In the October 2008 issue of the Communications of the ACM, ITIF Senior Analyst Daniel Castro debates the merits of paper-trails with activist David Dill.

New poll shows most Americans do not want state or federal tax agencies preparing their taxes.

In the United States the 2010 Census will be the most expensive in history, costing taxpayers more than three times what they paid for the 2000 Census. Recently, the Census Bureau made headlines when it announced that it would need another $3 billion to pay for a failed IT project. Yet technology should not be blamed for the cost overruns and technical problems at the Census Bureau, but rather poor technology leadership. As ITIF Senior Analyst Daniel Castro notes in this WebMemo, this most recent failure by the Census Bureau is evidence that the United States is no longer the global leader it once was in using IT for e-government. Most notably, the United States is one of the few nations not allowing its citizens to submit their census forms online.

Despite heated debate about the security and accessibility of voting technology, at the end of the day all sides agree that they want better voting systems. But what will the voting systems of the future look like? At this event, the lead scientists of two of the most innovative voting systems will unveil their most recent research and provide attendees the opportunity to participate in hands-on demonstrations of their technology. In addition, computer security expert Dr. Alec Yasinsac will present an overview of Operation BRAVO – a pilot project designed to bring a secure remote voting solution to the approximately 2 million overseas military and civilian voters who would otherwise be unable to vote.

Given the increasingly digital world that we live in, most Americans will be surprised to learn that they will be unable to complete the 2010 Census online. In a new report, ITIF analyzes the decision made by the U.S. Census Bureau to eliminate the Internet response option and concludes that allowing respondents to submit their survey online would have saved the Census Bureau and taxpayers money. In addition, ITIF challenges the conventional wisdom that using the Internet for such an application poses a security risk, and outlines how other countries have met this challenge.

Statement by ITIF Senior Analyst Daniel Castro to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) on the importance of innovation in improving our voting technology. Specifically, this statement discusses the role of using functional standards, as opposed to design standards, to promote innovation in voting systems.

Article by Rob Atkinson in FedTech Magazine on how government organizations need to embrace IT to innovate and collaborate to create a more open government.

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Critics of e-voting have demanded that Congress require all electronic voting machines to have paper audit trails. In this report, ITIF analyzes the arguments made by proponents of paper audit trails and debunks the myth that paper audit trails will secure our elections. ITIF advocates that the debate over voting technology should move beyond paper audit trails to a discussion of how new innovations can dramatically improve the ease and accuracy of voting. Specifically, the report focuses on new innovations in voting machines that offer "end-to-end verifiability" and explains the cryptography behind these systems.

A luncheon briefing on how the latest developments in communications technologies are improving the ability of public safety organizations to keep us safer. See event details and video.

Featuring Ian Liddell-Grainger, Conservative Party Member of the House of Commons, and Lord Cunningham, a former Labour MP, at the Henry J. Hyde Room, H-139, U.S. Capitol.

Article by Rob Atkinson in CIO Magazine about how CIOs should respond to the challenges posed by those who oppose the implementation of new technologies like RFID.

ITIF President Rob Atkinson argues that it is time for a radically new approach to e-government. Many e-government applications are user-unfriendly, designed around agencies’ needs rather than citizens’. By their very nature, governments have a hard time building applications that link together multiple agencies and programs, and an even harder time linking applications that cut across levels of government. To move to the next level of e-government functionality, governments must think of themselves less as direct providers of e-government services and more as enablers of third-party integrators that tie together multiple agencies across multiple levels of government to package information, forms, regulations, and other government services and requirements in user-friendly ways. Moving to this “turbo-government” model has the potential to dramatically boost the uptake of digital government services, cut costs for both government and users, and make the experience of dealing with government less frustrating.

For a shorter version of this report, see Rob Atkinson’s article in Public CIO Magazine.