A1. How would you improve transparency and accountability of public services (eg openness about access to information?)?

I think that the most resilient and sustainable way to improve transparency and accountability of public services is simply to open source as much research and organizational information as feasible. This will require profound transformations in academic culture as well as governmental culture.

In addition to opening information up for as many people as possible, it's important to make that information as accessible and user-friendly as possible. This is quite in line with the goals of http://wikinewzealand.org/ . However, I think we will all face ongoing challenges in creating databases, infographics and mind maps which are both democratic (with distributed responsibility) and coherent.

At the risk of seeming overly reductive, I think that the challenges of transparency and accountability are basically the same for any sort of social organization. Help all genuine stakeholders to see what all people and groups are doing with shared resources.

Perhaps we can radically develop the concepts of transparency and accountability while simultaneously refining our conception of what privacy, personal lives and personal relationships really entail.

Due to my reductive assessment of transparency and accountability issues, this is basically my answer for all of the transparency and accountability topics here! I hope OS//OS is going great for everyone. :)

I forgot one key aspect of increasing transparency and accountability, can also increase participation: simply, make things less complicated. There's a lot of irrational complication of complex issues in public services, as well well as most forms of human organization. It seems super important to know the difference between complex and complicated.

It's hard to get started when most people are so disengaged from government. However, I believe that realistic efforts to increase transparency and accountability of existing public services (and other forms of organization) will highlight their needless complications, and this highlighting will deeply incentivize a gradual and hopefully peaceful transformation towards more coherent, comprehensible social structures.

Most of this debate seems to centre around the process of access to information, which is incredibly valuable; but how about processes to make people accountable for what is made visible?

At the moment there is "consultation", and then the results of that process can simply be set aside if those running the processes have another agenda. How do we make consultation and other open processes actually "stick" to the accountable?

It starts with local. Let's grow transparency & accountability in a local service. Let's be bold & crank out a little project.
[ Easy say, simple to start, way more challenging to get traction on.. ]