Rating: 4/5 hopeful visions of impossibly functional governance
Author:
Daniel Lathrop
Laurel Ruma
Amazon Link:
referral program on hold :(
Open Government was a well rounded collection of philosophy, practical methods, experience in application, and discourse on alignment of open governance principals with democratic ideals. The text is well paced and continuously varied. Although it is very much an academic collection of writing it is still accessible to a casual reader and provides enough narrative interest to benefit from its overall time of writing in the grand sequence of American politics that plays out around it.
The Obama executive order surrounding the Freedom of Information Act and the way in which the various government institutions interpreted and executed the order was interesting, but the overall lack of significant movement on this topic despite that EO to date is somewhat disheartening. I would love to see a follow up to this text that provides a more recent update into distributed organizations, governance via algorithm, truly democratic systems, and other topics that have become more developed in the last 5 to 10 years based on further development of distributed, trustless networks for governance.
In summary, the book was interesting and well written, but has already become somewhat dated and I don't see that problem getting any better as we move further away from the time of publishing. I would wait for a new revision and update to the material before I would recommend this text to other readers.