This post is part of my coverage of the Science Online 2010 conference.

When the Office of Science and Technology Policy held an online forum about how to implement open access policies for research conducted by federal agencies, I leapt at the chance to broadcast my opinion to power; unfortunately, few others chose to do the same. I thought for certain that the slashdot crowd would jump at the chance to participate in a forum that wisely used the same crowd-moderation format as their nerd news site, but the link suggestion got no love.

Anil Dash, Government 2.0
Credit: Moi

Anil Dash works with ExpertLabs the organization enabling the government to solicit feedback from its citizens, and he wants to know why, in a packed room of attendees, only two people responded to the OSTP. There were several hypotheses, but the reason that made the most sense was that no one had even heard about the opportunity.

Why not? Why didn’t Slashdot carry the story? Why did Science Blogs only produce one quick link covering this remarkable opportunity (Christina K. Pikas was also the only other person in the room to respond to the OSTP’s request)? There’s also only one link to data.gov, a resource I would expect scientists to be falling over each other to poke, prod, and peer review, but there’s absolutely nothing coming from the science blogs on this.

Dash noted a similar phenomenon of non-participation among New Yorkers, who were incredibly active in getting President Obama elected, but are now sitting back, doing nothing except waiting for the Chief Executive to produce results. But this doesn’t have Anil Dash discouraged, he considers the American Government to be the most interesting startup of 2009. The Whitehouse started a blog, the federal government was mandated to go open access, and a series of informative websites have continued to open up government to the online community.

Dash has several explanations for the lack of public response to these incredible developments: experts don’t have the time or know-how to properly respond to the solicitations, policy-makers don’t know how to ask the right questions, and federal agencies don’t know how or are uncomfortable with the shameless self-promotion required to get a message out online.

I found Dash naively-optimistic at many points during the session, but that is a fantastic attitude to have in someone trying to lead a movement. In this case, the movement is one of experts providing advice to a government that is finally openly asking for it. There are numerous posts critical of the OSTP from the Bush-era, now that government is trying to fix things, there should be as many positive posts supporting those efforts.

Additional:

You can see a PDF of my raw notes from this session here.