Tag: Open Government

Stu Reiter

Co-Chair Open Government Advisory Group

 

The NRC posted the second addendum to its Open Government plan today. The 2014 – 2015 addendum re-caps activities we’ve done so far and outlines activities we’re planning through 2015. The addendum includes such topics as our use of Web streaming and conferencing technologies to increase opportunities for public participation in meetings and our new Web-based-system to share public meeting information and provide us feedback.

 The first Open Government plan was published in April 2010. The 2010 plan was written in response to President Obama’s January 2009 Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, and the subsequent guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget. The guidance required each agency’s plan to be updated every two years. In April 2012, our first addendum to our 2010 Open Government plan was published.

What else does the second addendum include? Among the topics:

• Our continued use of social media to promote a sense of common community, provide a unique venue for dialogue, and enhance the use of plain language in explanations of NRC activities.
• Improving access to documents open for public comment by redesigning our “Documents for Comment” Web pages to provide a one‑stop location for all rulemakings and other documents open for comment.
• Improving the timeliness of access to information by strengthening our Freedom of Information Act program. (Our efforts here have been recognized as “Best Practices” in a Center for Effective Government report.)

The 2014 – 2015 addendum also describes our programs to further collaborate with our state and tribal government and international regulatory partners.

We hope you will take this opportunity to review the plan.

Stu Reiter

Co-Chair Open Government Advisory Group

 

You probably hoped we were talking about Spring – long awaited for those of us on the East Coast – but in truth, we’re talking about the every-two-year review of the agency’s Open Government plan.

We published our first plan on April 7, 2010, and then issued a revision on June 7, 2010, to reflect your feedback. In April 2012, we updated our plan again – although our effort to get your feedback wasn’t what we’d describe as a resounding success.

On June 1, 2014, we will re-publish our plan. Among other things, we will note accomplishments over the past two years and plans over the next two years, including:

• Focusing on improving the process of handling Freedom of Information Act requests;

• Embracing the President’s Digital Government Strategy and, among other initiatives, deploying a mobile-based public meeting feedback option;

• Continuing to grow our social media program with increased subscriber and viewer rates – at times nearly doubling previous years’ statistics;

• Continuing to enhance our collaboration with state and tribal governments through a range of outreach efforts;

• Continuing to enhance our collaboration with the international community, with increased focus on sharing information after the lessons learned from the Fukushima accident;

• Improving the public’s ability to participate in the NRC’s regulatory processes by creating a one-stop web location for rulemaking actions and other documents open for comment;

• Modernizing the management of our records to make information capture and categorization more complete and transparent; and

• Enhancing stakeholder involvement in public meetings using technologies such as web streaming and conferencing

As we finalize our plan, we invite your thoughts on how we can further improve our openness program and its focus on transparency, participation and collaboration.

While comments are welcome at any time, comments must be received by April 4, 2014, to be considered specifically for the June update. Please submit your thoughts as comments to this post or via our Online Comment Form. We very much look forward to hearing from you!