President Obama's Memorandum on Transparency (still not published at WhiteHouse.gov) is just too important not to post in its entirety.  So here it is:

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES SUBJECT: Transparency and Open Government 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. Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public. Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government's effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government. Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation. I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive. This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person. This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register. BARACK OBAMA

Since the Memorandum on FOIA and Government Transparency are not yet posted at WhiteHouse.gov, I thought I would post them both on the Sunlight's blog. As you can imagine, we love the use of the Justice Brandeis' quote in the FOIA Memoradum.

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES SUBJECT: Freedom of Information Act A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike. The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public. All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA. The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely. I direct the Attorney General to issue new guidelines governing the FOIA to the heads of executive departments and agencies, reaffirming the commitment to accountability and transparency, and to publish such guidelines in the Federal Register. In doing so, the Attorney General should review FOIA reports produced by the agencies under Executive Order 13392 of December 14, 2005. I also direct the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to update guidance to the agencies to increase and improve information dissemination to the public, including through the use of new technologies, and to publish such guidance in the Federal Register. This memorandum does not create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget is hereby authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register. BARACK OBAMA

(adapted from an Open House Project Google Group message)

President Obama has stepped to the plate today, and addressed many of the Open Government community's primary concerns, in issuing several Executive Orders on ethics and transparency.

They're extremely heartening; the memos (via National Journal) are full of great passages, for example:

A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.  As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants."  In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government.  At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike. ... 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 presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public.  They should not wait for specific requests from the public.  All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government.  Disclosure should be timely.

Some of this isn't going to be easy, especially the idea of affirmative disclosure outlined above, which is likely only possible through affirmative designations applied across government records sets, with a careful eye to concerns of privacy, security, and the prerogatives of closed deliberation.  The CTO, OMB Director, AG, and GSA Administrator have quite an assignment for the next 120 days!

Another reason we should follow implementation of these memos closely: it's only too easy to rely on traditional procedures and distinctions for dissemination.  These memos, as far as I can tell, were circulated through a traditional and closed process, and there's still no access to primary sources online, from the White House Press secretary, the EO or Proclamation pages, or the blog of WhiteHouse.gov.  This is emblematic of the challenges that are going to face President Obama and his administration as they strive to live up to the promise of a truly transparent, participatory, and collaborative government, as these memos describe.

To be clear, I'd rather have such fundamental changes announced exclusively on the inside of specially marked boxes of cigars than not at all.  These are sweeping pronouncements, and show enormous promise and the realization of campaign and transition promises.  For the open government announcements to come so quickly further cements trust and accountability as what we hope will be central themes of any governmental operations.

It's the Obama administration's first full day, and they deserve praise for taking a bold stand on open government issues.  Hopefully their Office of Public Liaison (which is now accepting comments) and new media operations will take center stage as they ramp up operations, empowering the public in the same manner as these memos prescribe for the rest of government.

Jimmy Wales ,Wikipedia founder and Sunlight advisor, and Andrea Weckerle, attorney, communications consultant and blogger, wrote an interesting column last week  at CNN.com, on how we should create a more tech friendly government.. The duo say that “technology isn't ancillary or extraneous to governance, and instead that it's an integral part of the effective running of a democratic superpower.” In anticipation of President-elect Obama's appointment of  the country’s first national chief technology officer (CTO), they provide five recommendations for core components of a structurally sound, technologically savvy federal government. Their points, in brief:

1.    Ruthlessly modernize: Conduct a survey of the technology used by the federal government, keep what works and replace what doesn’t. 2.    Create openness of information: This will allow transparency and accountability, as well as inspire innovation and collaboration. 3.    Single sign-on across all government Web sites for citizens: Make it so citizens need only to input a single username and password to access all federal Web sites and databases, creating more user-friendly interfaces for citizens that in turn encourage frequent use and participation. 4.    Commit to open-source software and open standards: Such a commitment by the feds would end the practice of adopting closed proprietary software sold by companies with political ties to government. 5.    Create a single government-wide wiki: Large private enterprises have achieved substantial efficiencies by allowing their employees to rapidly share knowledge and disseminate information. The feds should create a single, massive government-wide wiki, which would serve as a cornerstone of a modern federal knowledge management system.

Read their whole column here.

Obama’s promise to appoint a federal CTO has created a frenzy of speculation, especially among those concerned with privacy, security, government management, intellectual property, national Internet policy, and many others, including the transparency community. The discussion has become a Rorschach test of sorts, leading civic advocates of all kinds to project their priorities onto the soon-to-be established office.

Here’s what we’ll be looking for: A small-d democratic visionary: The CTO should be someone who has a vision of how the Internet and related technological advances can involve Americans in their government again, improve the effectiveness of government, and make the democratic process more engaging and participatory. He or she also must have the ability to spread that vision across government and with the larger public, by making the work and data of government more open, available, and transparent.

A balanced appointee: The CTO should have competence both as a technologist and a manager, since the CTO must understand the underlying technology to achieve the goals outlined above, as well as have the managerial clout to implement them. While a solid combination of these distinct skills is probably hard to come by, they’re both necessary for setting a new national course for government to use technology to achieve public information and engagement ends.

A strong office: The CTO’s office could be any number of places within the administration, and its location will determine the amount of authority a CTO can wield. We’re looking for real leadership and centralized authority within the executive, with the clout and presence necessary to coordinate technology usage and policy government-wide. The appointee should work closely with the President, and have the ability to act with the force of his authority, with reliable funding, staff, and a strong mandate for reform.

Specialized staff: Though the deputies presumably working under the CTO will likely be announced later, their specialized expertise should reflect the variety of challenges the CTO will face. Sunlight is looking to see staff in the CTO’s office dedicated to creating a more transparent government, starting with President-Elect Obama’s promises to make crucial data about ethics, campaign finance, and lobbying far more accessible online.

An interactive role: The CTO should lead, by example, the government’s efforts to cultivate the public interactions by which technology policy is best developed. Mailing lists, contests, blogs, standards bodies, and coordinative task forces have all been deployed successfully in the past. The CTO’s office should be our best example of taking advantage of public expertise and enthusiasm, by using the same technologies and best practices that can transform the rest of government.

Footnotes:

Change We Can Believe In, (p. 88):

Appoint a National Chief Technology Officer Barack Obama will use technology to reform government and improve the exchange of information between the federal government and citizens while ensuring the security of our networks. To that end, he will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies, and services for the twenty-first century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices

New York Times piece mentioning Obama's expected announcement tomorrow.

UPDATE: via nextgov:

According to the Obama transition team, they have no plans to announce who may fill the CTO position on Wednesday. According to senior reporter Jill R. Aitoro: "That report is wrong, there is no CTO announcement on Wednesday," said Nick Shapiro, transition spokesman in an email correspondence with NextGov.com. He confirmed also that the person would not be named tomorrow either. Beyond that, no details were provided about when the announcement might be made, and other members of the transition team did not respond to inquiries.

Here's a possible object lesson for the new Obama Administration. Canada's Democracy Watch says their  federal government gets a D grade this year for transparency and democratic reform, principally because it hasn't acted on 27 changes it promised, even though the Harper government has strengthened or tried to strengthen accountability in a number of areas. The report says the government could have earned a B grade had it implemented all the reforms promised in the 2006 election campaign but they have left a lot of loopholes that hurt accountability and transparency. They call for a tougher accountability act.

The Obama transition team released two new policies this week, a Creative Commons license and a radical disclosure policy. These changes don't just signal a new relationship to the public, but also create a paradigm shift in how government manages information, and could lead to much bigger things to come from the administration. Requirements for affirmative disclosure move the onus of dissemination to the government (unlike FOIA, which relies on citizen requests), and might just revolutionize the way our government views its communications.

Creative Commons

First, the transition team changed its copyright policy, and is now publishing under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. This is great news, since, contrary to popular opinion (see the comments here), transition materials aren't automatically in the public domain, despite the .gov web address. This means that reuse of their work is now encouraged, within carefully crafted guidelines, and, more importantly, that the transition team is thinking about the real effects of their publication methods. That's exactly what the Creative Commons was designed to do: to add a level and control and nuance to a legal framework designed around limitations. Whereas Copyright is about control, the Creative Commons and copyleft movements are about empowerment, through carefully crafted designations created by brilliant lawyers. (For example, "You are free to Reuse... or Remix, [so long as you] attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor...)

Creative Commons licenses are affirmative designations with real legal force, enabling creativity and reuse through a carefully crafted set of nuanced licenses. (Keep that in mind...)

At the Table

Next, the transition team introduced their Seat at the Table feature. At first glance, "Your Seat at the Table" might look like a kitschy PR portal. What is the entire change.gov site supposed to be, if not a seat at the table? A closer look, however, reveals that this specific feature is in fact different from the rest of the site -- it's the result of a significant policy change. From the (actual) memo sent out from John Podesta, as posted on the site (pdf):

Scope: The following information will be posted on our website: 1. Documents: All policy documents1and written policy recommendations from official meetings2 with outside organizations. 2. Meetings: The date and organizations represented at official meetings in the Transition headquarters or agency offices, with any documents presented as noted above. This scope is a floor, not a ceiling, and all staff are strongly encouraged to include additional materials. Such materials could include documents (recommendations, press releases, etc.) presented in smaller meetings or materials or made public by the outside organization without a connection to an official meeting.

The footnoted section contains the real meat, since it defines what must be disclosed:

1This policy does not apply to non-public or classified information acquired from the Agency Review Process and internal memorandum. 2 An “official meeting” is defined as a meeting with outside organizations or representatives of those organizations to which three or more outside participants attend.

To summarize, the transition team has decided that all policy documents and recommendations presented at official meetings with outside groups will be posted online, and they're defining "official meetings" as those at which three or more representatives attend.

Now, it's tempting to quibble with the definition of "official meeting", but remember, this is the transition team, not the administration. They're only operational for a few months, and nothing like this has been tried before in this context, so their policy is entirely appropriate. They're posting primary resources, in near real time, and at least acknowledging the public's role as overseer and partner, and nothing says they have to. They've created a new designation (the official transition meeting), and used that designation to generate public access and oversight.

This is a brave, bold move, and the transition team deserves our praise.

Affirmative Disclosure?

All this raises a more significant question, however. What could such a program look like across the entire executive branch? In other words, does "Your Seat at the Table" scale? Could there be a system of affirmative designations that broadly opens executive branch information, just as Creative Commons has in the creative sphere?

This is pretty complex question, but we do have some other examples of government information programs that are based on managing carefully crafted records designations. Here are two...

First, think of classification, the official process by which our government keeps secrets. It's so prolific that it costs about $8 Billion per year (pdf). (That doesn't count the CIA's classification budget, which is, well, classified.)

Second, we have General Records Schedules, which are designations that the National Archives uses to standardize how administrative records are kept across the government. The FDA issues regulations on meat, and NARA issues regulations on paperwork. (Though NARA has initially resisted playing any enforcement role, despite failing preservation procedures government-wide.)

These are two enormous government programs dedicated to controlling public information. My question is this: If we have set up a complex, $8 Billion system for making secrets, and have created a complex system for managing the flow of paper throughout government, where is the public disclosure system? Who should be deciding what the public can see, and how they see it?

Should we be thinking about creating a system for proactive disclosure, where documents or data can be designated for release, RSS, API, upload, download, IG review, FTP, or whatever?

Especially after the last administration has made it easier to make secrets and obfuscate, shouldn't the Obama administration make it easier to say "Hey, someone should really be taking a look at this!".

This makes sense as a whistleblower provision, or even as a data management practice. Imagine if witnesses to malfeasance were empowered to flag troublesome documents for publication, or at least for further review, and that those designations carried some administrative or legal force, like Creative Commons licenses, or the designation of a "public meeting". Imagine if a Webmaster or CIO were capable of submitting requests to the OMB data task force, or to the Public Data Advisory Team.

Even better, imagine if all government data were given a proactive designation by an empowered centralized Information Officer, Transparency Czar, or Deputy CTO. We already do this for secret-keeping, and for historical preservation. Real-time public access should be at least as important as history and secrecy.

(discussion also on the Open House Project google group.)

Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, gave a very interesting talk (audio and slide show available) at last month's Web 2.0 Summit in Toronto. Mark advocates creating cities that think like the Web - and says cities can learn from projects like Mozilla.

Mark's main point: openness and participation created a better Internet...They can also create a better city. Much like how Mozilla formed a decade ago to open up the Internet, improve the Web and encourage people to participate, the same principles of openness and participation can also help make better cities.

Mark gave three examples of where this is already happening: FixMyStreet.com: a project of our friends at MySociety.org in the United Kingdom where municipal problems are registered; Google/Transit: where users can get step-by-step transit directions from most major cities around the world; and Washington, D.C.'s own AppsForDemocracy.org: the District's open innovation contest where technologists battled it out to see who could create the most useful applications from D.C.'s Data Catalog. The things these three programs have in common is that they encouraged participation and openness and each have the potential to make the cities function better. Plus, the cities are not doing the heavy lifting, he adds.

He advocates three ideas: 1. Open the data; 2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city; and 3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the Web.

He ends with pointing to President-elect Obama's promise to "use cutting-edge technologies to reverse this dynamic, creating a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America's citizens." And I would only add that Web 2.0's "architecture of participation" and openness not only has profound implications for making cities function better, but it also holds great and transformative promise for all government, from the president and Congress on down.

This is great news. Over the weekend, the Obama–Biden Transition team switched the copyright policy for their Web site, Change.gov, from the old fashioned "copyright protected model" to the most  open Creative Commons license. Lots of folks had noticed this oddity and there had been a low buzz of conversation about it. It's really terrific to see the Transition team catch this early on and free the information. So we can now mix and remix the content there. It will be interesting to see what we can do with it.

The Washington Examiner was kind enough to publish an Op-Ed I wrote on transparency in the new administration.

The starting paragraphs:

The history of the American experiment has seen a constant struggle for fundamental change and reinvention. President-elect Obama ran on change, and now faces high expectations for a radical transformation in how the public relates to the presidency. At the core of every “government reform” initiative has been the urgent sense that government was failing in its basic responsibilities, and that citizens' needs were not being adequately represented in Washington. Caused by economic hardship, government waste, flagrant corruption or over-concentrated power, these eras all saw constituents' hostility coalesce into new expectations, to which public officials were forced to respond. Now is no different. Obama campaigned in accord with the anti-incumbent mood, placing change and innovation over tradition and experience, running as an agent of reform.