A recent DNI Open Source Center publication presents a guide to the Iraqi provincial elections that took place on January 31. The report was prepared prior to the elections and does not reflect their important results, but it does provide an informative overview of the electoral process, the Iraqi provincial council structure, and the thirty-six contending coalitions, with valuable individual profiles of the numerous coalition members.
Like most OSC analyses, it has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News. See “Iraq: Provincial Elections Guide 2009” (pdf), Open Source Center Report, January 21, 2009. (For an initial assessment of the Iraqi election results by Philip Zelikow, see here.)
In a recent meeting with the Director of CIA Information Management Services, we reiterated our view that all unclassified, non-copyrighted publications of the Open Source Center (which is managed by CIA) should be made freely available to the public.
“I will convey the message,” the Director told us.
The Center for Democracy and Technology and Openthegovernment.org are inviting members of the public to suggest categories of government documents that they believe should be easily available online, but are not.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.