On Thursday, the White House announced the winners of their Leading Practices initiative, that they first outlined in April.

The Leading Practices were designed to highlight examples where agencies have risen above the expectations set by the White House, and proactively attained a higher standard of transparency. (I participated in helping to establish the leading practices standards.)

The winners are a collection of some of the best transparency work being done at federal agencies, with HHS taking the slot for transparency (quite deservingly). These winners are a nice counterpart to the White House page on Open Government Highlights.

As I wrote when the Leading Practices were first announced, though, there is a bittersweet element to this congratulatory platform. As the White House rightly points to the great work some agencies are undertaking, we can't help but wonder whether there is an analagous effort being undertaken with agencies who are struggling with (or blowing off) the Directive's requirements.

While we can hardly expect the White House or OMB to publicly chastise any laggard agencies, we do have to wonder how much of a private stick exists to go along with this public carrot.

According to Aliya Sternstein, the members of the Senate Commerce, Science, & Transportation Committee failed to ask Aneesh Chopra, President Obama's nominee as Chief Technology Officer, questions about his positions regarding open government and the use of technology in advancing open government during his nomination hearing.

The office of Chief Technology Officer will oversee many open government initiatives and is charged with formulating, along with the Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration, an Open Government Directive directing agency heads to follow the principles set forth in the President's open government memorandum.

The Open Government Directive is scheduled to be released on Thursday -- 120 days after President Obama signed a January 21 memo on ethics in government -- without Chopra's input. (Update - commenter Stanley Buckley writes that the Directive is not set to be released, rather recommendations will be released on Thursday.) "I won't be [presenting the recommendations] because I'm not confirmed," Chopra said, according to Sternstein.

Unfortunately, due to the Senate's lack of questioning, we did not get a chance to see how Chopra views his role as it relates to open government and technology during his nomination hearing.

Over the weekend, The Boston Globe published an important op-ed about President Obama’s transparency and the right-to-know agenda, written by Mary Graham, co-director of the Transparency Policy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. Repairing current yet “broken” transparency policies should be President Obama’s first priority, Graham writes, and by doing so he would create a “powerful new instrument for change.”

Current transparency policies don’t really work very well. The assumptions that led to them  are correct, that is, citizens too often make crucial health care, investment and other matters,without the input of reliable information. Graham argues for more facts to be “presented in standardized, timely, and understandable ways so people can compare mortgage lenders, credit card deals, surgery outcomes, and more.” Transparency policies fail today because they don’t allow accurate comparisons, they’re vulnerable to politics and conflicts of interests and disclosure rules rarely keep pace with new risks. And I'd add, an awful lot of that information isn't available online and little is available in real time. It isn't disclosure if it's not online.

She advises the new Administration to communicate transparency policies in common and clear language so they can be understood by ordinary citizens. The Admnistration should mandate that the people within government designing the policies communicate and collaborate with each other. And the agencies should find ways to track unforeseen risks.

I would add a few other agenda items for the executive branch that are vital to fostering true transparency. In the Web 2.0 era data must be interoperable. In other words, all government databases must be made to work together. We believe that the administration needs to set up a strong central authority to control information policy, funding and standards. The  naming of  Aneesh Chopra and Vivek Kundra to the positions of federal CTO and CIO, respectively, are positive developments on this front. And finally, government should allow and encourage citizens to participate in government through collaborative projects, like the successful Peer to Patent Project.

Graham writes persuasively, “Neither the economy nor health care can be fixed unless transparency policies are fixed...Markets and ordinary citizens can cope with risks as long as they can understand them.”

That sounds like transparency to me.

President Obama ended the months of speculation surrounding his creation and appointment of the first federal Chief Technology Officer (CTO) by appointing Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra. Chopra's selection was praised across the Web. Sunlight's John Wonderlich saw Chopra speak last year and wrote up his thoughts on him here. The video of that talk is below (h/t John Wonderlich and Jon Henke):

And this is the President's announcement appointing Chopra as the first federal CTO. (The announcement comes towards the end.)