DC Open Government Forum, public event Wednesday October 21st

See their webpage.
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But DC also needs a stronger civic culture, one focused on accountability and excellence rather reveling in mediocrity.

NYC's Independent Budget Office, the quality reports produced by the City Auditor in Seattle, or the independent reports produced by the Municipal League of King County (Seattle) (e.g., "Review of Metro Transit") are examples of organizations that provide independent objective analysis.

Sure groups like the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, the DC Appleseed Center, and organizations like Brookings, the Urban Institute, and others produce reports on DC, but they all have axes to grind or are a little too close to power (Brookings, Urban Institute, Alice Rivlin) to question the Growth Machine too closely.

Plus groups in NYC like the Municipal Arts Society, Transportation Alternatives, the Citizens Union Foundation, and the Center for an Urban Future have so much more heft than equivalent groups in DC.

(If I ever do get the Citizens Planning Coalition relaunched, the idea is to have a combination of these four groups, plus some aspects of the Open Society Institute, as well as an action/research focus.)

Plus, publicly disclosed government data collection and evaluation systems, such as Baltimore's CitiStat program, or the more than one decade (I think) that the City of Austin, Texas has been making their agency evaluation information public.

-- City of Austin Performance Measures Database

DC evaluates agencies. But it is hard to find the data, or to know how objective and meaningful are the measures and metrics.

Plus I would like to see the City benchmark its performance against other agencies in the region and nationally.