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By Mark Henricks
Federal agencies last week revealed what they planned to do to conform to President Obama’s Open Government Initiative. The announcements from virtually every arm of the federal government arrived on schedule as required by the White House mandate, and they revealed a hodgepodge of approaches to removing barriers between Americans and their federal government. Most consisted largely of strategic plans and concepts, although some have been operational for months. And they covered the IT waterfront, from giving the public Web-based access to government databases to online scheduling of meetings with Social Security bureaucrats.
Here are some of the highlights of programs already up and running:
- The Department of Energy’s Open Energy Information wiki platform, launched last December, provides free access to data on clean energy, including resources, maps of worldwide wind and solar potential, and best practices. Users can upload information to the site as well as download it.
- The Department of Labor’s Online Enforcement Database lets users search records of enforcement actions by OSHA and other workplace regulators by state, ZIP code, business classification and other criteria. Some of the data has been previously unpublished, according to the White House. Long-term, the department plans to use the site to promote best practices and encourage user feedback.
- The General Services Administration’s Citizen Engagement Platform is a software service storefront that will make it easier for government agencies to cost-effectively employ blogs, wikis, forums and other engagement tools. The storefront, said to resemble those from Google and Go Daddy, is available only to GSA at the moment but should be expanded to all agencies in the spring. This development effort has a price tag: $20.5 million in the proposed $675 million GSA budget.
Most of the initiatives were not much -- if any -- past the strategic plan stage. For instance, the Department of Defense Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record is an Obama-inspired vision for electronic health data sharing. The idea is to allow DOD and the Department of Veterans Affairs to securely exchange standardized administrative and medical data “from the day an individual enters military service, throughout their military career and after they leave the military.” At this point, however, the two largest departments in the U.S. government have accomplished little more than awarding a handful of contracts to vendors working on pilots for the project, which is expected to take up to three years.
Some agencies provided more details about their plans. The Department of Justice’s FOIA Dashboard interactive Web site with data on Freedom of Information Act compliance, for example, will be launched in two phases. The first phase, to be completed by September, will use 2009 FOIA data from 25 departments including DOJ. By March 2011, the initial data set will be expanded to include 2010 FOIA compliance data from all 92 federal agencies that report it.
All told, the announcements in the first week of April did at least marginally please advocates of government transparency, as well as provide some guidance to IT executives interested in how open government might affect their dealings with the world’s largest IT customer. While they show that Washington has a great distance to go to reach Obama’s sweeping vision, they also indicate that some progress is being made, more is planned and, meanwhile, the whole idea hasn’t been quietly swept under the rug.
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