One of the first things I did when I started this blog was to start a series of posts establishing some foundational definitions for critical concepts.  Definitions I was using as the basis for how I approached my work at NASA.  But to this point, I have yet to establish a definition for Open Government. 

That was until I starting working on a presentation I’m giving in a few weeks at GOSCON.  In my research ((Can we just go ahead and replace the word research with “surfing around the web”?)), I latched onto the Wikipedia page for Open Source Governance and found a passage that I believe works best as a definition of Open Government. 

Open Government is to…

advocate the application of the philosophies of the open source and open content movements to democratic principles in order to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy.