Meet the Office of Public Engagement

Meet the Office of Public Engagement (formerly known as Office of the Public Liaison) which now places more of an emphasis on citizen engagement with the government.

They've created a Citizen Briefing Book based on "a process by which Americans outside of Washington could come together to present ideas directly to the President."

"The idea was to use the Transition website, change.gov, to create a grassroots version of the research binders that presidents receive every day. But instead of advice from top government officials, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is composed of ideas submitted by ordinary people and reflecting the enthusiastic engagement from the public we saw throughout the course of Change.gov. 125,000 users submitted over 44,000 ideas and cast over 1.4 million votes, with the most popular ideas accumulating tens of thousands of votes each. This book contains some of the top ideas, broken into groups by issue area."

I really enjoy the fact that the book contains "word clouds" on the topics, such as this one for the "Energy" section:


Learn more about the OPE, read the OPE Blog, and learn more about their staff, at whitehouse.gov/ope.