The White House this morning released two new documents, and one has strong implications for how important data is disclosed.

The Memo on Regulatory Compliance (not to be confused with the larger Executive Order on Regulatory Review) specifically addresses data and information about how private entities disclose information to the agencies that regulate them.  The memo describes the importance of such disclosure:

Greater disclosure of regulatory compliance information fosters fair and consistent enforcement of important regulatory obligations.  Such disclosure is a critical step in encouraging the public to hold the Government and regulated entities accountable.  Sound regulatory enforcement promotes the welfare of Americans in many ways, by increasing public safety, improving working conditions, and protecting the air we breathe and the water we drink.  Consistent regulatory enforcement also levels the playing field among regulated entities, ensuring that those that fail to comply with the law do not have an unfair advantage over their law-abiding competitors.  Greater agency disclosure of compliance and enforcement data will provide Americans with information they need to make informed decisions.  Such disclosure can lead the Government to hold itself more accountable, encouraging agencies to identify and address enforcement gaps.

To achieve those goals, the memo mandates three actions.

First, agencies have 120 days to make plans about how they're going to post compliance data better. This is an important step from the White House, whose December 2009 Open Government Directive (itself an OMB Memo) was broader, and required plans for data, without creating meaningful priorities for which types of data should be disclosed.  After some criticism, and after considering different approaches to data prioritization, this is one strategy that's emerging: to force agencies to focus on their core regulatory functions, and disclose that information better.

To do this well, agencies should come up with concrete plans. Plans to make more plans for forming non-binding working groups aren't an appropriate response.  Each agency is capable of publicly auditing all of their regulatory compliance data, to create a plan that reflects the agency's unique ability to lay out what is knowable about their work, and chart a course toward better disclosure of their core functions.

Additionally, these plans should be public, and online, on each agency's /open page.  The memo doesn't require it, but there's no reason agencies should do this planning in isolation.

Second, the CTO (Aneesh Chopra) and CIO (Vivek Kundra) are directed to work with the agencies to get their information online in "in searchable form, including on centralized platforms such as data.gov, in a manner that facilitates easy access, encourages cross-agency comparisons, and engages the public in new and creative ways of using the information."

Third, top officials are directed to "explore" better ways to share compliance information across agencies.  The vagueness of this mandate reflects the difficulty in its enactment.  The barrier to this sharing that Sunlight is most familiar with is the unique identifier problem, where entities tracked by government agencies are all assigned different unique identifiers.  The different systems government relies on to assign identity to (especially corporate) entities are largely incompatible, proprietary, and poorly designed.  Among many other problems, this needs to be addressed in order for regulatory compliance information to be more effectively shared.

Today's Memo is a step forward for the White House, and a nuanced move toward better transparency policy.  To move beyond the first two years, the Obama Administration has to be willing to force agencies to make meaningful distinctions about their work, and publicly force them if necessary.  This memo, and the disclosures it should create, can help transform how our government undertakes its duties.

Here are some of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies over the past week:

CQ Weekly's Maura Reynolds wrote about the Obama administration's successes and failures in achieving its transparency goals six months into the term. Reynolds quoted Ellen Miller, Sunlight's director, about how many of their transparency initiatives are still in development and how the kinks are being worked out. "A default position that government data will be accessible to the public in machine-readable format is a huge step forward," Ellen said. "Is it moving as fast as I'd like? Of course not. But I can be patient while this unfolds." Ellen also commented on some of the administration's initiatives, such as "town hall" meetings, that have been tightly controlled. "There is real transparency, and then there is transparency theater,'' she said. "I can distinguish between the two." Reynolds wrote that the more people expect the Internet to deliver the information they want, the more kinds of information they will expect to access that way. "It's kind of a genie out of the bottle," Ellen said. "The Internet has raised expectations. I fundamentally believe that the way technology pushes information out to the edges will have a powerful effect on the power structure." Reynolds reports that open government advocates praise two federal Web sites, USAspending.gov, a site that tracks all federal spending and was set up as a result of a bill co-sponsored by then-Sen. Obama, and Data.gov, the site the new administration designed as a "one-stop shop for number crunchers that consolidates statistics across federal agencies in standard, machine-readable formats." The article quotes Gary Bass, director of OMB Watch, saying the sites could be vehicles for connecting government performance to spending. "From the point of view of the average user, there has been nothing like this before. That is truly a credit to this administration." Reynolds notes that it was OMB Watch's FedSpending.org that served as the technical platform for USAspending.gov.

Despite the existence of rules requiring congressional lawmakers to disclose earmarks they request, rules do not exist requiring them to disclose items classified as "program support." The Washington Post's Carol Leonnig illustrates this problem with a report on how $160 million intended to help Mexico's police buy U.S.-made first-responder radios was tucked into the voluminous congressional plan for U.S. military spending next year. Leonnig quotes Bill Allison, Sunlight's senior fellow, "It kind of makes a mockery of the disclosure requirements we have. They will disclose the little things, the $1 million projects, but when you have the big-ticket items, you don't have members willing to take responsibility for those."

Stephanie Condon, writing at CBS News' "Political Hotsheet" column, cited a report from Taxpayers for Common Sense that found that lawmakers serving on the the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense included 1,080 earmarks worth $2.7 billion dollars in the fiscal-year 2010 defense appropriations bill they approved last week. The lawmakers specifically requested more than $1.6 billion in earmarks for their campaign contributors, entities who had donated nearly $1 million to the committee members.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and Taxpayers for Common Sense achieved a major victory when the Senate voted to halt production of the Air Force's top fighter jet, the F-22 Raptor, as reported by The Boston Globe. POGO called it a “landmark vote" that “marks the end of business as usual, and the beginning of real reform, in Washington." And Taxpayers termed it a “giant step for fiscal sanity (that) affirms the government’s ability to stop unneeded weapons programs even when they are firmly entrenched in the American industrial and congressional base."

Tom Hamburger and Peter Nicholas at The Los Angeles Times reported on Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, asked a simple question: What had the nation's banks done with all their bailout money? And the Treasury Department answered that they don't know. The Times reporters quoted Ellen crediting the Obama administration for making more government data public. She cited Data.gov as an example of a genuine attempt to put a wealth of government information on the Internet. But at the same time, Ellen said: "We don't see any radical changes from what we've seen in the past." The Chicago Tribune's "The Swamp" blog picked up the story, as did a number of other outlets across the country.

National Journal's Eliza Krigman reported on Cato's Jim Harper launching a contest at WashingtonWatch.com. The contest, supported by Sunlight, is meant to encourage citizens to contribute online to an earmark database to track how congressional lawmakers steer federal funds to special interests and projects in their districts. Krigman notes that the project is similar to Sunlight's Transparency Corps. Amanda Carpenter at The Washington Times, Ryan Singel at Wired's "Epicenter" blog and Nate Anderson at Ars Technica wrote about WashingtonWatch.com's earmark contest as well.

In their headlines for Monday, Democracy Now reported on a bipartisan group of centrist and conservative senators who called on Democratic and Republican leaders to put off a vote on health care reform legislation for 70 days. In the report they cite info from Paul Blumenthal's blog post on how each of these senators has raised at least $1 million from the health and insurance sectors combined over the course of their respective careers.

National Public Radio's Andrea Seabrook and Peter Overby, in a report the network broadcast on Wednesday afternoon's edition of "All Things Considered," asked the question, "Who has access to U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (Mont.), the chair of the Senate Finance Committee?" They highlight and link to the graphic produced by Paul and Kerry Mitchell, Sunlight's creative director, that traces health care lobbyists' ties to Baucus and other senators on the Finance Committee. They also interviewed Paul who said, "In Washington, relationships are part of the huge game of influence. If you don't have a relationship with someone on the Hill, then you aren't going to have the kind of access that you need for your client." And so, Paul said, these lobbyists — and their clients — have a unique brand of access to one man at the center of the health-care debate.

Anne Mulkern of Greenwire (subscription required) reported on an analysis conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics of a portion of lobbying disclosures for the second quarter of 2009 by energy companies, which show that electric utilities increased their expenditures, nearly catching up with oil and gas. While Congress debated and voted on the Cap and Trade Energy Conservation Bill, electric utilities spent $12 million, while oil and gas spent $13.9 million, attempting to influence the outcome. The New York Times republished Mulkern's piece.

The the Financial Times and Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi have picked up LittleSis.org's profiling of Bob Hormats, Obama's pick to be under secretary of state for economic, energy, and agricultural affairs. Hormats, as vice chair of Goldman Sachs (International), has dubious ties to the genocidal regime in Sudan through a Chinese oil company.

Quinn Norton at the Irish Times highlights Transparency Corps in an article about how crowdsourcing can be an effective means of getting labor-intensive work done online. Norton quotes Clay extensively, “Right now we’re just trying to keep up with the users, which is a nice problem to have.” Clay said that next up will be a project from LittleSis.org.

When President Obama issued a memorandum to "ensure the responsible spending of recovery act funds," he required members of the executive branch to report or make publicly available certain lobbying communications while avoiding engaging in others. However, both his memorandum and later OMB guidance appear to have a big gap: they overlook communications between lobbyists and the executive branch about stimulus policy.

President Obama's memorandum imposes the following requirements on executive branch officials who are contacted by registered lobbyists about the economic stimulus legislation:

1. No lobbyist can verbally communicate with a member of the executive branch about "particular projects, applications, or applicants for funding."

2. A lobbyist can communicate in writing with a member of the executive branch about "particular projects, applications, or applicants for funding." However, the executive branch staffer must publish the written communication -- the document -- on the agency's web site within 3 days.

3. A lobbyist can verbally communicate with a member of the executive branch about policy matters. The executive branch staffer must record information about the communication (names, dates, clients, and subject matter) in a form, and post that form online within 3 days.

4. A lobbyist can communicate in writing with a member of the executive branch about policy matters. The executive branch staffer neither needs to record information about the communication nor place the written communication -- the document -- online.

It is this fourth point that is odd. Why should written communications about policy matters be treated differently from verbal communications about policy matters? Or treated differently from the submission of funding request documents to executive branch staff? The point of placing information online is to allow public scrutiny, and yet there is a huge gap. There is no reason to believe that this omission is any more than an oversight (no pun intended). I didn't even realize the loophole existed until I tried to diagram the disclosure process.

I suggest considering a new rule: all written communications about stimulus policy matters must be placed online within three days. Placing the documents online would make them easily searchable and increase transparency. It would also save the executive branch staff member the time required to evaluate the document's contents to determine whether it is related to policy or contains a specific funding request.

It would be interesting to know who is contacting the administration in support or opposition to its stimulus lobbying disclosure requirements. (Documentation of the Sunlight Foundation's meeting with Norm Eisen on this issue can be found on the White House web site.) Also, it's not clear to me whether discussions of broad areas of policy -- e.g., requesting more funds be devoted to the defence sector -- would be characterized as a policy matter or a specific funding request. Reframing the topic shouldn't be a way to get around the disclosure rules.

From a practical standpoint, I understand that placing online every written communication from a registered lobbyist about  the economic stimulus is a nontrivial task. But asking lobbyists to send written information electronically is not a big ask, and would support President Obama's goal of ensuring  "the responsible spending of recovery act funds."

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.

Weekend before this most recent one, Government 2.0 Camp took place here in Washington and by all accounts it was a huge success. Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and Sunlight’s senior technology advisor, led a panel discussion about what the meaning of transparency is in the Obama administration. During the discussion, Andrew and the participants came up with "Top 10 Measurements for Transparency." And it’s quite a comprehensive list.

Here’s a photo of the board they were taking notes on:

Here’s a short video of Andrew quickly running through the measurements:

Ten Measures for Transparency Success from Gov 2.0 on Vimeo.

Here’s a quick outline of the 10 measurements:

1.    Open data: The federal government should make all data searchable, findable and accessible. 2.    Disclose spending data: The government should disclose how it is spending taxpayer dollars, who is spending it and how it’s being spent. 3.    Procurement data: How does the government decide where the money is getting spent, who gets it, how they are spending it and how can we measure success. 4.    Open portal for public request for information: There should be a central repository for all Freedom of Information Act requests that are public to that people can see in real time when the requests come in, how fast the government responds to them. 5.    Distributed data: The government should make sure it builds redundancy in their system so that data is not held in just one location, but held in multiple places in case of a disaster, terrorist attack or some other reason where the data is damaged. Redundancy would guarantee government could rebuild the data for future use. 6.    Open meetings: Government meetings should be open to the public so that citizens can tell who is trying to influence government. All schedules should be published as soon as they happen so that people can see who is meeting with whom and who is trying to influence whom. 7.    Open government research: Currently, when government conducts research, it usually does not report the data it collects until the project is finished. Government should report its research data while its being collected in beta form. This would be a measure of transparency and would change the relationship that people have to government research as it is being collected. 8.    Collection transparency: Government should disclose how it is collecting information, for whom are they collecting the data, and why is it relevant. The public should have the ability to judge whether or not it valuable to them, and giving them the ability to comment on it. 9.    Allowing the public to speak directly to the president: Recently, we saw the president participate in something called “Open for Questions,” where he gave the public access to ask questions. This allowed him to burst his bubble and be in touch with the American public directly is another measure of transparency. 10.    Searchable, crawl able and accessible data: If the government were to make all data searchable, crawl able and accessible we would go along way in realizing all the goals presented at the Gov 2.0 Camp.

I wanted to note all this for posterity. We'd love to hear you comments and thoughts about it.

On Tuesday, Rasmussen Reports released a telephone survey that shows the Americans have strong doubts about whether congressional lawmakers understand the content of the Stimulus Bill show prior to voting on it. According to the survey, which included the views of 1,000 likely voters contacted over Sunday and Monday, 58 percent of U.S. voters say most lawmakers will not understand what is in the plan before they vote on it. Only 24 percent believe most of Congress understands the contents of the 700-page-plus plan before they vote, with 19 percent not sure.

On one level this is really depressing. On the other, it's probably an optimistic reading of the situation. How can members of Congress, much less the public, be expected to read, digest, and understand a bill of this complexity without having time to do it!? It's ridiculous.

Sunlight has long advocated that all legislation be posted online for at least 72 hours before consideration in the House and Senate. This is a very simple, common sense idea: Posting bills online for 72 hours before consideration would give lawmakers and citizens alike an opportunity to consider and debate bills with full knowledge and consideration of the implications of the legislation with considered feedback from the public.

Please join us in asking President Obama to post the final Stimulus Bill on WhiteHouse.gov for five days before he signs it. (It looks like Congress will ignore our call to post it online before their consideration.) Go to the White House’s contact form to urge President Obama to post the final bill as approved by the House and Senate on WhiteHouse.gov. Please do it today, as this bill is moving very quickly.

Hat Tip: Glenn Reynolds.

As we wait for Obama to name his new CTO, some encouraging news on the federal IT front is breaking. Candi Harrison, writes at her blog that Bev Godwin, director of USA.gov, will be joining the White House as director of online resources and interagency development on the New Media Team.  Candi writes that Bev knows the Web manager community, and she will bring that knowledge to the table when decisions are being made. “You couldn’t have a better, more savvy and more capable advocate,” she writes. “This is great news.’

Nancy Scola at Tech President concurs. “With this and other appointments, team Obama is turning the White House into social media's center of gravity in Washington, which is a distinct change from the past.” And Craig Newmark is also excited. “I, for one, welcome our new (Web content) nerd overlords.”

Let us second (third? fourth?) these acclamations for this appointment. We've worked with Bev a little and she and her GSA team have been focused, savvy, and smart about the institutional barriers they will confront as they try to fulfill the President's promises on transparency, open government and collaboration.

Christopher Dorobek, managing editor of Federal News Radio and author of DorobekInsider.com, is reporting that they’ve confirmed that President Obama is set to name the immensely talented Vivek Kundra, Washington, D.C., government’s CTO, as the next administrator of e-government and information technology within the Office of Management and Budget. Good news indeed.

But a whole lot of questions remain as to how the whole picture will be painted.

For instance, there are currently three White House IT-related positions, with a fourth being the proposed CTO. The administration has done little to explain what the various IT offices have responsibility over. Dorobek writes that he sees four pockets of government IT expertise: A Congressional Research Service report, published last month,  illustrates  how “murky” things remain and how the four key positions on this arena -- the e-government administrator at OMB; OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs; the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; and the proposed Obama CTO will divide up responsibilities and work together.

Dorobek says: “Frankly, one of the problems has been that there hasn’t been enough of a coordinated, strategic approach to technology, information technology and data, and this seems like an opportune time to make all those lines clear.”

Dorobek points to NextGov’s Jill Atoro as suggesting that Virginia’s secretary of technology, Aneesh Chopra , might be Obama’s CTO pick.

Staying tuned here.

The National Academy of Public Administration, like many of us, is encouraged by the Obama administration’s promise to transform the culture and the day-to-day functioning of the federal government into a much more transparent, participatory, and collaborative reality.

The academy sees three challenges that are inhibiting a truly collaborative federal government: an outdated 20th Century approach to technology where each agency has their own rigid IT environment; an inability to relate data to information, and information to decision making; and a bureaucratic culture where strong incentives exist to protect institutions as opposed to allowing cooperation and innovation.

The NAPA has issued a paper, "Enabling Collaboration: Three Priorities for the New Administration," which encourages the new administration to meet these challenges head on. They outline a collaborative model that brings citizens’ ideas and priorities into the process of decision making and governing. They suggest the administration create an open technology environment by building a modern communications infrastructure; treat data as a national asset by replacing the focus on controlling information with a focus on sharing it; and foster a culture for collaboration by revising laws, policies and habits that inhibit innovation and collaboration. By focusing on these priorities, the new administration can begin transforming federal agencies so that they are enabling a more open and transparent democracy. While there's nothing that's very new or radical about their suggestions it's great to see NAPA on board.  All of us working for transparency in government will have to work doubly hard to make sure candidate Obama's promises are fulfilled.

Leena Rao at TechCrunch reports on how Directgov.com, the British government’s online portal providing information and services from across government, is asking developers to help them think of ways to make the site more innovative, responsive and open to input from citizens.

Yesterday they had such an opportunity. Much of the U.K. was hit by a rare major snowstorm, crippling pretty much evertyhing. U.K. Cabinet Office Minister and Member of Parliament Tom Watson reports that, as a parent, the only thing on his mind Monday at 7:30 a.m. was whether his son’s nursery school was open or closed. So he purchased a domain name (SchoolClosures.org) and then twittered a challenge to the folks at Directgov.com, “Fancy rising to the challenge for tomorrow morning?” They quickly built SchoolClosures.org, a working prototype of an online service to provide an open and easy way to report the status of local schools. “It is an amazing thing,” Tom wrote on his blog, “not just the tool but the way in which they have turned things around in about 28 hours.” Tom hopes that Web users will recognize that this is a massive change in approach for Directgov. “Well done to them,” he adds. Well done indeed.

In TechCrunch Rao writes how the Obama Administration prides itself on online community engagement, and suggests they should take a page out of the UK’s digital playbook. “Perhaps the next step is to be specific and more goal-oriented about open-source initiatives, as Directgov seems to be,” Rao adds.