Flickr Photo: h.koppdelaneyTransparent. Participatory. Collaborative.

Those are the values President Obama cited last December in his Open Government Initiative. Are those words you usually associate with your government? Even non-conspiracy theorists would likely have a hard time summoning up "transparent" as one of the top three adjectives to describe our government. We would all likely agree that it's a shame: our government should be transparent.

Now let's think about our sector. 

Transparent. Participatory. Collaborative.

What do you think? Do those words describe the nonprofit sector? How about your nonprofit? 

If I'm not mistaken, a somewhat famous social activist once said, "You must be the change you want to see in the world." I think our sector has a long way to go before we live up to that.

I attended "In Code We Trust: Open Government Awesomeness" at SXSWi on Friday. Panelists Noel Hidalgo, Alissa Black and Dmitry Kachaev shared what their governments -- the cities and states they work for -- are doing to live up to that presidential mandate. What they're doing, and how they're doing it, are great lessons for our sector.

• The New York State Senate has a Twitter feed. They post everything, including links to live streams of sessions, statements, and legislative updates.
• The New York State Senate website is built on Drupal. Their theory is that anything they build has to be built open source, so that the taxpayers can access and use any innovations.
• All of the content produced and published by the New York State Senate is published under a Creative Commons license. Again, if it's built with public money, the public has the right to use it.
• In San Francisco, datasf.org aggregates raw data from over 140 city departments, making it available to any member of the public, for any reason.
• Since transparency is only one leg of the stool, San Francisco also sponsored an app development contest to get people involved in using the data for the public good.
• San Francisco and Washington DC are collaborating around API accessiblity for their 311 phone lines.

Two city governments, on opposite sides of the country are going to better serve their citizens transparently, to ignite participation through collaboration. Will it be problem free? No. Is it worth striving for? Of course

One of my favorite moments of the session came when someone asked about the barriers to this kind of openness. Dmitry responded:

"Don't wait for all the data, or for the data to be perfect. If the data can contribute to the conversation, share it. The public will help you get it the rest of the way."

Let go and share -- with your stakeholders, your clients, your fellow organizations. Good things will follow

That said, it's fine for me to sit here and write this. It's another thing for NTEN to lead in this area. Although I think we're a fairly open organization, we have a long way to go. Look for a new "About Us" page on this site soon. We'll be posting all sorts of information about us, and we'll make all that data as open as possible. (If you're a Drupal wiz looking for a challenge, give us a call. We want to rock the sector.)