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What Citizens Can Teach Civil Servants About Open Government

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Category: Blog

Created on Friday, 29 January 2016 11:04

Brazil's largest city is embarking on an ambitious experiment to educate its public employees on the benefits of transparency.

An open government is one that is transparent, participatory and collaborative. But moving from traditional government operating behind closed doors to more open institutions, where civil servants work together with citizens to create policies and solve problems, demands new skills and sensibilities.

As more and more American public-sector leaders embrace the concept of openness as a positive force for governmental effectiveness, they would do well to look toward Brazil's largest city, where an unusual experiment was just launched: an effort to use a variation on crowdsourcing to retrain Sao Paulo's 150,000 civil servants. It's described as the world's largest open-government training program.

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