Today, the Obama administration announced an ambitious new directive for improving transparency and openness in government practices – and the role technology can play in improving access to information.  The plan makes it clear that the bias should be towards releasing more, not less information; FOIA requests should not be stonewalled, but rather they should have a presumption of validity.  And, recognizing the need to rebuild trust in the government, the directive sets forth aggressive timetables to provide information regarding how government dollars are being spent.
ACT fully supports the administration’s move to clarify the rules for agencies, and set up clear plans and timelines.  Access to government data will undoubtedly facilitate interesting applications that do everything from help us choose where to live, to tell us what roads are going to be closed soon.
It was especially nice to see that some of our “Best Practices” (see page 10) made it into the directive, including the need to provide significant opportunities for collaboration, the recognition that openness should not supersede privacy and security, and that Agencies will need to decide on how to meet these goals internally, rather than a “one size fits all” approach.  We covered much of this in our April post about “we-government”.
While the plan is very impressive, it does leave a few open questions and potential pitfalls.  The timelines the administration has set are very aggressive.  I worry that in the haste to meet the deadline, some agencies might resort to dumping pdf scans of documents on the web, rather than ensuring the data is produced in “machine parsable” formats that we and experts from the Sunlight Foundation have been advocating.
Additionally, the open formats requirement is one area of the plan that leaves a lot of open questions. Everyone agrees that the government should make information available in open formats whenever possible, but agencies should also have the flexibility to produce that information in multiple formats in order to meet the needs of all Americans, especially the accessibility community.
Overall, I think it’s a great start – I’m looking forward to a great finish as well.