From the national SPJ FOI blog:
The Office of Management and Budget released an 11-page “Open Government Directive,” laying out how the federal government shall work more openly.
President Obama in January instructed OMB to come up with the plan. The plan took a while, but it looks pretty good. Some highlights (note the “shalls” and “shoulds” – those are important):
- Agencies shall put information online in a timely manner and should make it in a format that is easily searched and retrieved.
- Within 45 days, each agency shall publish online at least three “high-value” data sets that haven’t been online previously.
- Within 60 days, each agency shall create an “Open Government Webpage” to allow input from the public and post its FOIA report and backlog numbers annually. Agencies are to come up with plans to increase transparency.
- Within 45 days, OMB will create a working group to focus on transparency issues.
So essentially, it’s a plan to start planning for transparency. That’s a good start, and the talk is great. It’s difficult to tell, however, if anything will become of it (See blog posts by The National Security Archive, Secrecy News, and OMB Watch). Agencies can create all the plans they want, but if they don’t deal with backlogs and make (useful) documents and data more accessible then it is all fluff and PR. Perhaps, I hope, it will start developing a culture of transparency, which would be nice. Let’s see what happens!
And don’t forget there is a free webinar about how open architecture software can be used to make government more open.
