There was some exciting news from the White House last week regarding government transparency via a GOV 2.0 initiative. If you missed it, that’s understandable. Most media outlets were otherwise engaged with the shocking revelation that a professional athlete had strayed from his marriage. However, beneath the din of the Tiger Woods scandal, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued its directive(.pdf) for executive departments and agencies to publicly share vast amounts of information.
The Dec. 8 OMB directive is the latest outgrowth of Barack Obama’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government(.pdf), issued Jan. 21, 2009, in which the president laid out the three principles of his Open Government Initiative:
My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.
The directive memo from OMB establishes specific steps and deadlines for government agencies to adhere to those principles. Within the memo, the following four steps are established in pursuit of the administration’s transparency goals :
- Publish Government Information Online
- Improve Quality of Government Information
- Create and Institutionalize a Culture of Open Government
- Create and Enable Policy Framework for Open Government
The “flagship” site for this effort is already up and running at Data.gov. At present, however, only a limited number of government agencies are participating.
If the Dec. 8 Open Government Initiative(OGI) is properly followed, every government agency will have added three existing “high value data sets” within 45 days, and will have created systems for disseminating future data within 120 days. In between these deadlines, all government agencies are to have their own open government websites active within 60 days, from which Data.gov will import their open source formatted data.
Thus far, open source advocate reactions have been cautiously optimistic, viewing the OGI as big step in the right direction. However, as Steven Aftergood noted Dec. 8 at Secrecy News, “Success is not guaranteed.”
The previous Administration used to invoke the theory of “the unitary executive,” which generally holds that all executive branch power and authority is vested in the President. But the opposite may be closer to the real state of affairs, in the sense that the exercise of presidential authority is dependent on innumerable acts of compliance by scattered officials any of whom can, whether through disobedience or incompetence, frustrate the implementation of policy. And the more ambitious the proposed change, the more likely it is to encounter resistance.
More recently, he remarked that the “Openness Initiative” was beginning “to take root.” Again, there are some concerns. “Most national security and intelligence agencies, however, met the new Open Government Directive with silence, as if it did not concern them,” Aftergood wrote. While the OGI specifically prohibits sharing classified information, there are existing non-classified data sets presently controlled by the intelligence community. Aftergood suggests that this would be a good place for them to start.
The opinions of Aftergood and others — Meredith Fuchs, lead counsel at George Washington University’s National Security Archive, for example — will be important to watch as the OGI moves forward. Advocates of government openness are a tireless bunch. Should some of the executive branch agencies resist the directive, and if its deadlines aren’t met, these are the folks who’ll be shouting the loudest.
I’ll list some additional resources below, but there are reasons to be optimistic about the initiative’s success; lead among them, Obama’s choice as Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra has already implemented a similar program for the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Kundra is considered to be among the leading innovators in using technology to ‘democratize data.’
See Also:
- W. David Stephenson, “Democratizing Data to transform government, business, and daily life.” 23 July 2009. ~ This is Stephenson’s speech transcript and PowerPoint presentation for Tableau Customer Conference in Seattle. He is the author of the upcoming book, “Democratizing Data,” which was to be co-authored by Vivek Kundra, before Obama snatched him up for his CIO.
- From WhiteHouse.gov, “Open Government Cabinet Commitments in Service of National Priorities.” ~ Here you’ll find the stated transparency commitments from 20 government departments & agencies. Also see Kundra’s and Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra’s Dec. 8 online presentation and q&a session.
- Meredith Fuchs, “Obama Administration on Open Government: More than Rhetoric?” UNREDACTED, nsarchive.wordpress.com, 8 December 2009. ~ Also see Fuchs’ blog post, linking to numerous reactions to Obama’s OGI.
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