Yesterday, the Obama administration made a few new announcements about its vision for technology in government.

Between the Presidential Memorandum, the Digital Government Strategy (html, pdf), and the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, they covered a lot of ground. By far, though, the most interesting parts to me were about creating the "new default" for open data:

1. Make Open Data, Content, and Web APIs the New Default

...Under a presumption of openness, agencies must evaluate the
information contained within these systems for release
to other agencies and the public, publish it in a timely
manner, make it easily accessible for external use as
applicable, and post it at agency.gov/developer in a
machine-readable format

At first blush, this seems very exciting -- we have long requested that agencies make better decisions about what information gets released and what doesn't. I'm concerned, however, that this new requirement looks the same as many, many requirements that have come before it.

The Paperwork Reduction Act, first passed in 1980...

(d) With respect to information dissemination, each agency shall— (1) ensure that the public has timely and equitable access to the agency’s public information

...requires as much, through requirements both met and ignored.

OMB Circular A-130, first written in 1985:

Because the public disclosure of government information is essential to the operation of a democracy, the management of Federal information resources should protect the public's right of access to government information... Agencies must plan in an integrated manner for managing information throughout its life cycle. Agencies will:

(a) Consider, at each stage of the information life cycle, the effects of decisions and actions on other stages of the life cycle, particularly those concerning information dissemination;

The Presidential memo, from day one of the administration:

Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.

The Open Government Directive requires agencies to create...

A strategic action plan for transparency that (1) inventories agency high-value information currently available for download; (2) fosters the public’s use of this information to increase public knowledge and promote public scrutiny of agency services; and (3) identifies high value information not yet available and establishes a reasonable timeline for publication online in open formats with specific target dates

...which most agencies failed to do, with a few notable exceptions.

The Presidential Memo on Regulatory Compliance Data requires plans and a review of data:

First, agencies with broad regulatory compliance and administrative enforcement responsibilities, within 120 days of this memorandum, to the extent feasible and permitted by law, shall develop plans to make public information concerning their regulatory compliance and enforcement activities accessible, downloadable, and searchable online.

...but only a handful of agencies ever released those plans, and of those, only DOT attempted to be comprehensive in their review.

The US Open Government Partnership National Action Plan:

Provide Enforcement and Compliance Data Online. Agencies will continue to develop plans for providing greater transparency about their regulatory compliance and enforcement activities, and look for new ways to make that information accessible to the public.

There are probably many more similar requirements. One policy after another has required that government officials make better decisions about what gets released to the public, asserting that openness is the new presumption (like the Holder DOJ memo on FOIA, as yet another example). What's strange, though, is that the new strategy suggests that open data is the "new" default. Did the other policies not work? And if not, how will this new technology strategy achieve what the other policies haven't?

Maybe the new strategy will create processes and incentives that create better decisions out of government officials. We certainly hope so. But when reading through yesterday's announcements, it's hard not to have some doubt over how much new information will be released. Ultimately, these initiatives succeed or fail based on whether new things become knowable, and whether new things get done. But throughout four years of the Obama administration, we've learned a lot about the limitations of aspirational policy declarations. What's to separate this new policy from what's come before it?

Now, there are certainly good things within these plans. Clearly much of the way citizens interact with government will take place through mobile platforms, and nothing but good can come of placing fellows throughout government to help design new initiatives.

But for each exciting new development, there's something that looks to me like a retreat.

The fellows program brings new perspectives into government, but defines its open data goals narrowly:

This program aims to stimulate a rising tide of entrepreneurship that uses data from governmental and non-governmental sources to create tools that can help Americans better navigate their world, such as by finding the right health care provider, identifying the college that provides the best value for their money, saving money on electricity bills through smarter energy shopping, keeping their families safe by knowing which products have been recalled, and much more.

That's great, everyone wants entrepreneurship. But why limit an open data initiative to that category of information? The first two years of the Obama administration's transparency work were devoted to empowering citizens, while this initiative is about empowering consumers and entrepreneurs. Again, those are both worthy goals, but why has the technology agenda's scope narrowed?

In short, it's because the administration has defined comfortable ways of engaging with accountability questions. The White House (admirably) created Ethics.gov, but other than that, Obama the reformer has largely gone quiet ever since the 2010 defeat of the DISCLOSE Act. The affirmative ethics agenda turned into defensiveness. The transformation of poltical power through technology that characterized the Change.gov agenda from 2009 doesn't show up at all in the government-wide technology agenda in 2012.

Maybe it's unfair to respond to a new technology plan with issues that are probably outside the control of both the CTO and CIO behind the strategy. But the administration that planned for regulatory agencies to "conduct the significant business of the agency in public" has removed regulatory documents from public view at the peak of their relevance, and the administration that promised to "shine a light on pork barrel spending" still hasn't enforced a Bush era executive order requiring earmark request transparency.

Of course, we never expected a new technology strategy to give any real help to these issues; former CIO Vivek Kundra's 25 point plan was about managing IT investments, and was largely agnostic towards real information policy concerns.

But we should judge policies, especially Presidential policies, on both what they do and what they don't do. This new strategic plan does a lot, but it also leaves some very telling omissions.

Open data policies aren't doing nearly as much good as they can, because they usually fail to require new information to be disclosed.  To fix this, governments should make their information policy decisions as publicly as possible, indexing their major information holdings, and publicly determining whether or not to release information.

Most newly implemented open data policies, much like the Open Government Directive, are announced along alongside a package of newly released datasets, and often new data portals, like Data.gov. In a sense, these pieces have become the standard parts of the government data transparency structure.  There's a policy that says data should generally be open and usefully released, a central site for accessing it, some set of new data, and perhaps a few apps that demonstrate the data's value.

Unfortunately, this is not the anatomy of an open government.  Instead, this is the anatomy of the popular open government data initiatives that are currently in favor. Governments have learned to say that data will be open, provide a place to find it, release some selected datasets, and point to its reuse.

What gets left out of these initiatives, however, is often the most important part -- the decisions as to what gets released, and how.  Many open government data discussions skip over the question of whether governments are deciding appropriately what gets released and what doesn't.  Instead of making complex decisions about what should be released, central governments suggest that those decisions are hard, and that as long as there's always some new information, then we're making progress that deserves praise.

Progress or not, open data policies often pretend to be something they aren't.  The Open Government Directive is simply dismissed or ignored by agencies who decide not to release information, as we've often pointed out before.

In the face of this shortfall, we at Sunlight have tried to focus on real decisions about actual datasets, and to force agencies to do the same. While that's proved difficult to do, as existing requirements like the Paperwork Reduction Act, the OGD, and the Presidential Memorandum on Regulatory Compliance are often ignored, agencies do respond when pushed on substantive, particular issues.

So we're not giving up on forcing agencies to make information policy decisions in public. One of the most important things that governments can do to be more transparent is to list, or index all of their information holdings online.  CIOs should be more than just technology purchasers; the word information is in their title. Every agency should have a public list of its major information holdings, along with a description of whether it's public or not, and why. Without creating such a list, how do Chief Information Officers even do their jobs?

Now, the question "where is all of our information" can be a tricky one to answer, but agencies can rely on threshold definitions.  For example, any database with a maintenance cost over a certain number should be listed.  Any information specifically described in a statute governing the agency should be described.  Any form, report, or data described in the regulations governing the agency should be described.  Whether the information is usually (or never) accessible via FOI request should be noted, and whether bulk data is available through a central portal should be spelled out as well. (By far, the best example of such a review that we've seen is the DOT regulatory compliance plan, and the closest we've found for Congress is this.)

If the public, and if the Congress (or other legislatures) are to be involved in creating a more open government, we need to be able to measure openness against a background that makes sense.  Governments ask to be measured against the failures of the past, but that's just an insufficient standard by which to judge transparency reform.

Comprehensive indexes and audits of agency data force governments to make publicly accountable decisions about what is public and what isn't. Lists of government data shouldn't just include already public offerings, either. (New York's new open government law makes just this move, requiring lists of "public" data, allowing exceptions for anything that might be withheld for any reason, and ignoring all the information that should probably be public, but isn't.) If we can't see the decisions governments are making about what to release, then we can't change them.  FOI laws provide a basic instrument, but a broad mandate that places the data management burden on agency officials could systematically open far more information than ad hoc requests are ever likely to.

If governments can build data portals, hold competitions, and spend huge sums of money on complex data systems, they should be able to build public lists of those systems, along with a description of what is public and what isn't. Archivists have done this for a century for old records, and it's time for a similar amount of rigor to be applied to transparency policy decisions.

The missing open data policy is the one that says list your data, and say which of it is open, and why.

Tomorrow is the two year anniversary of the Open Government Directive (OGD), the signature transparency policy issued by the Obama administration on December, 2009.

The transparency issues facing the administration, both before and after the 2009 policy, fall well beyond the control of the OGD, which is, after all, an OMB memo. Nevertheless, the OGD is Obama's single broadest attempt to create transparency across the executive branch, and the most high profile attempt to live up to Obama's campaign rhethoric on transparency.

Over the last two years, Sunlight has become familiar with the inherent limitations of directives and declarations such as the OGD, as we've learned that the difference between an aspiration and a mandate can be a huge gap. Announcements about new transparency policies imagine the best possible impact, while implementation often looks to the minimum requirements.

So to mark the two year anniversary of the OGD, we decided to look at implementation of the Open Government Directive.  Since much of the OGD is written in broad, aspirational language, we decided to review how well agencies have lived up to the commitments they created for themselves in their open government plans.  The OGD required agencies to publish these plans, which were all posted and revised during 2010, and often included deadlines and goals for agencies to release data and tools.

Building on the work that OpentheGovernment.org did reviewing all the agencies' plans (we participated in that review), Sunlight has pulled out all the deadlines from the agencies' plans, and checked to see whether the goals were met.

The results are decidedly mixed.

In some cases, agencies' goals were clearly met.  Many of the datasets planned to be released are now available on data.gov, and the projects and tools that agencies described are underway.

Often, however, agencies have failed to live up to the standards that they set for themselves as a result of the Open Government Directive.

The Commerce Secretary never put up a schedule. The Office of Science and Technology Policy only put up 4 years of budget data. And the Department of Justice apparently decided that none of the data they identified for public release was fit for publication on Data.gov.  Perhaps most egregiously, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded part of their plan to post a schedule for new data to be released, and released a new version of the plan scrubbed of that milestone.

Any broad declaration or aspirational policy is going to face complex challenges, as we've noted. But the agencies applied these goals to themselves. Far too often, agencies are failing to live up to the transparency goals that they themselves created. And this review only the concrete goals that agencies set. Many agencies didn't even go through the hassle of setting detailed deadlines for themselves. The Defense Department won't show up on most of our evaluation, because they hardly set any deadlines at all, and mostly committed (doc file) to talking about openness and doing some untrackable internal reviews, despite their size and obvious public importance.

We've expressed disappointment in the Open Government Directive before, pointing out, for example, that the Open Government Directive requires:

A strategic action plan for transparency that... (3) identifies high value information not yet available and establishes a reasonable timeline for publication online in open formats with specific target dates.

Cass Sunstein (director of OIRA) once called me Oliver Wendell Holmes for insistently pointing out that agencies who said they'd make some future plans failed to live up to this requirement -- that a plan to make plans was an obfuscation, and that if the White House didn't take this seriously, they'd create the wiggle room that would let agencies evade the White House's best intentions. If he meant that I was being too much of a realist, then I stand by that assessment even more firmly now, as most agencies have clearly failed to comply with that passage.

And that cuts to the heart of the OGD. Openness without information is emptiness.  If some agencies won't even share the plans they've made for publishing new information, how far can their commitment to openness possibly go?

The Open Government Directive has caused a lot of good.  And it has also often failed to live up to its promise, the administration's rhetoric, and agencies' own self-imposed compliance plans. We should remember that Presidential rhetoric and bureaucratic commitments are not the same thing as results, especially as even more administration work happens through broad, plan-making executive actions and plans.

Transparency proclamations are valuable, but the path to transparent government runs through a thousand fights over information. The OGD may have moved the default slightly towards openness, but it doesn't win those fights alone.

We'd like to invite you to review our evaluations of agencies' progress (searching through all the agency sites and plans can be tricky), and to help us think about where the OGD should go from here.

Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey wrote this post. 

As part of its Open Government Directive, the Obama Administration took steps to make a wide variety of federal data publicly available online. The Open Government Progress Report, released in December 2009 lists open government projects and transparency milestones that support the goals of the OGD. Included among these are a number of important data-sets.

These data-sets have been utilized by journalists, bloggers, organizations, and citizens. They have informed investigative stories and think tank reports, contributed to unique and useful visualizations, inspired projects dedicated to helping the American public make better use of data, and helped to shine sunlight on previously hidden areas of government.

As part of the OGD, the Department of Treasury released IRS Statistics of Migration Data. The data tracks how tax return filers moved around the country and has helped illustrate migration patterns through space and time. The data has been well utilized by a variety of sources. Forbes took the data and created an attractive and easy to use interactive map. Nielsen found that migration from the Northeast to the South and Southwest was correlated with underwater mortgages, while Ad Age focused their analysis on the migration of people as well as money. Additionally, Brookings Institution scholar William Frey used the data as part of a report on recent shifts in migration trends.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration began to publish employer-specific information about occupational fatalities. This data, intended to help employers identify dangerous conditions and "take steps to improve safety and prevent future accidents," has also allowed investigative journalists to expose unsafe conditions and tell heartbreaking stories. The Center for Public Integrity and Huffington Post took advantage of the OSHA data in a series of articles that expose unsafe working conditions.

Data posted on recovery.gov proved useful in a number of ways.  It allowed interested parties access to information to assess stimulus programs. Data available on the site contributed to reporting on the collapse of Solyndra, helped bloggers in Wisconsin outline benefits to their state, and allowed academics to create novel tools to analyze individual stimulus projects. The nature of recovery.gov also made it easy for critics to weigh in on the shortcomings of the tracking process itself, by identifying areas where data is missing or incomplete.

Data.gov, a central repository for Federal government information, has attracted millions of viewers and inspired major cities, several states, and even other countries to launch sites of their own. Information in the database was used to create some unique and useful applications. AnalyzeThe.US aims to "enable anyone to develop an intuitive picture of the complex flow of resources, money, and influence that affect how our government functions."  Similarly, DataMasher pulls from data.gov and other sources and allows users to compare state level data on various issues.

This post represents a small sampling of the ways that data released via the OGD has been used.  It has proved to be a valuable resource for journalists, researchers, and average citizens.

           

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.

Cowritten by Laurenellen McCann

When federal agencies released their open government plans earlier this month the thing I was most excited for was new data. While the Open Government Directive didn't specifically require agencies to submit previously unavailable data, 75 new data sets have been promised for public release.

Some of these new data sets have never before been seen by the public. For others you needed to purchase expensive proprietary software. A few only covered a few years and are now being expanded - some to the turn of the 20th century!

There's no single good methodology for determining "what's new" just like there isn't a single good methodology for defining a "single continuous data set". To be clear this is a list of new data sets that are to be released on or after April 7th, 2010. Many government agencies released new data earlier in the year as well. This isn't an exhaustive 2010 list - it's a look into the future.

We've saved you the trouble of going into each plan individually by publishing the spreadsheet below. You can also download the information in a variety of formats by clicking on "Menu" in the upper left corner and then "Download this data." View the data full screen by opening up the "Views" menu:

Open Government Plans: New Data after April 7th, 2010

This spreadsheet is meant to serve as a resource for citizens, journalists and government officials to get a heads up on what data the entire federal gov. has committed to publish. It might come as a surprise that of the 31 agencies that published their Open Government plans on April 7th, only 16 are responsible for proposing the 75 new sets of data. The key word is new. Most government agencies promised to release data tools that were actually aggregators, dashboards, or other web services that run on information you can already find on Data.gov or other agency web sites. Others counted their recent releases of information that is already public and published every year. These data sets did not meet our "newness" criteria. In order to account for what information is genuinely new a data set had to be newly released -- that is, the data must have never before made available to the public online in a freely readable format. It also had be named, evidence that the agency releasing the data is actually initiating the process of opening up this information. Where possible included hyperlinks to additional information about the data set - in some cases it's even the link to the page where the data will be published. This spreadsheet is meant to serve as a resource for citizens, journalists and government officials to get a heads up on what data the entire federal government has committed to publish. Our Reporting team has already been writing about new data coming out of the Open Government plans and pointing out places where work still needs to be done. We're also releasing a single file download for all the federal Open Government plans. Instead of having to round up all 31 files individually, you can just download this single ZIP and get them all in one go. If you're looking for additional information about the Open Government plan of a particular agency, the White House has has published a list of hyperlinks. Beth Noveck, Deputy CTO and Director of the Open Government Directive has published a look into the horizon from her perspective. She also submits her highlights from other sections of the Open Government plan. Our focus has been the data section of the transparency plank - agencies were also asked to develop plans on participation and collaboration. Any ideas on other ways we can make the Open Government Directive more useful to you is welcome in the comments. Be sure to sign our transparency pledge to keep government accountable to their promises! Stay tuned for the week before May 1st - the White House will be releasing their own assessment of the Open Government plans. Photo credit: “Federal IOU” by Laurenellen McCann Photo model: Nicko Margolies

CTO Aneesh Chopra blogged an announcement yesterday laying out the Administration's next steps after the April 7th milestone.

The Adminstration’s transparency initiative, though, was designed to fail well. This isn’t the same old OMB memo. If it were, we’d all be calling it OMB Memo M10-6, its real name.

There are several announcements here packed into one.   Chopra announced the updated White House dashboard, and set a May 1st goal for a White House evaluation of agencies' plans.  He also invited everyone to dig into open government plans, and suggest improvements and offer feedback.  This is an important invitation, and one we're going to continue to take advantage of.  The plans from April 7th can really be a version 1.0 if they get updated and improved, which takes effort and feedback.

Third, and the focus of this post, Chopra announced "leading practices" guidelines, that set out goals beyond the minimum goals defined in the Directive.  I'm happy to have had a small role in shaping the policies the Open Government Working Group created, which basically means discussing ideas and approaches for defining excellence in transparency.

These guidelines are a big deal.  I wrote yesterday about how it's difficult, right now, to distinguish between meaningless bureaucratic language (on one hand), and authentic, legitimate planning as it occurs within a huge institution.  Are agencies stalling, or are they bringing about change in the ways they know how?

These leading practices make that distinction matter less.  Even if some agencies don't take the Directive seriously, these guidelines were built to move.  And by move, I mean forward.  The Directive, and the enthusiasm it has created among the agency officials who have caught the transparency bug, could just peter out, if the administration issued the Directive and said "Great! We're done!"

That's clearly not what is happening, however.  In addition to the day one Memo, Executive Orders, multiple Memoranda, the public consultation, the Directive, and agency plans, agency officials are being encouraged to think of ways that the Directive hasn't yet gone far enough, and then those results are being published on WhiteHouse.gov.

We're certainly disappointed in the way that many agencies' plans complied with the Directive's data-related requirements.  The Adminstration's transparency initiative, though, was designed to fail well.  This isn't the same old OMB memo.  If it were, we'd all be calling it OMB Memo M10-6, its real name.  (That's not an overstatement, many of us refer to A-130 as though it were a fun nickname.)  Instead, the "OGD" (Open Government Directive) is shorthand for what is, to me, several hundred conversations, plans, meetings, processes, and official documents.  Most importantly, it's not something that has ended.

Criticism of the Directive, and its results, aren't met with a "well, you should know we Worked Hard on this, and have some complex things to balance!"  Instead, they're met with "that's what we're looking for, more please."  That's a very important difference.  Defensiveness results from a static process, one that is considered done.  Welcoming criticism, though, is the hallmark of an evergreen work in process, where getting credit isn't as important as getting to the right answers, no matter how long it takes.

These leading practices could be interpreted as an admission that the Directive's requirements don't go far enough.  And in a way, that's true.  But it's also by design.  Technology has changed what's possible quickly enough that no one has all the right answers.  Making the government's work truly public (read: online) will take laws, regulations, guidance, procedures, and experimentation (in order from strict to loose), all backed up with lawsuits, criminal penalties, admonishments, encouragement, recognition, and prizes (from negative to positive).

By pursuing an evaluation process that focuses on the positive, the White House is, in part, choosing to pair the public carrot with the private stick, as is to be expected for government reform efforts.  They're also giving up on any claims to having all the best answers out of the box.  In place of that, they get something more important -- a process that, if they continue to pursue it openly, will lead most reliably to the best answers.

Sigh. I feel like a disappointed parent.

When the details of the Open Government Directive were announced early last December I was unbelievably excited. Seriously. My long time hope that one day government would get “it” about the importance of putting public information online appeared to have arrived. Government data was going to become available as a default and that was going to start with an “inventory” (government's word) of the “high value information” (also their words, though less than ideal because who would ever agree what that means?).

Agencies were supposed to do two things with respect to releasing data: create an inventory of the “high-value information” currently available for download and identify high value information not yet available along with establishing a reasonable timeline for publication of that data online. It was that latter requirement that I salivated over. Certainly there are other important aspects of Open Government -- participation and collaboration are values we hold dear at the Sunlight Foundation. But yesterday was the day when the rubber was supposed to hit the road on data. For many agencies, they didn't even get out of the garage.

There are some very interesting data that's going to made available, almost immediately (and John Wonderlich, our Policy Director, has a post on it) but some agencies avoided the requirement entirely, some decided to say they'd make a plan to plan how to identify and release data, and others mentioned it but didn't explain how they would achieve it.

First, our quick review shows that a little more than half of the 30 agencies' plans we reviewed (18) specifically identified new data to be released -- 12 did not. (This includes some independent agencies.) The total number of data sets identified to be released -- approximately 89.*

89 data sets identified for release - across the entire federal government!? I'm speechless. I was looking for inventories of data (this is the Directive's word, after all) -- actual audits of what data each agency collects and dates of when new information would be made available. That is not what we got.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was among the best - identifying 14 new data sets to be released - and this is crucial data. While maintaining the privacy and identity of patients HHS will be releasing critical data about Medicare: everything from inpatient hospital stats to prescription drugs and hospice care. During an era on increased responsibilities for HHS this data is absolutely critical to keeping HHS effective and accountable.

Few agencies rose to the high water mark of HHS. Part of the problem might be attributable to cultural barriers and the illusion that some bureaucrats hold that this is "their" data vs "all of our" data. Part of the problem might have been time to pull the information together.

Maybe, a bigger part of this problem is a loophole in the Open Government Directive itself. By asking agencies to only inventory their "high-value" data it gave them an instant out for just about anything. Despite the White House's good intention in defining high-value as: "increase agency accountability and responsiveness; improve public knowledge of the agency and its operations; further the core mission of the agency; create economic opportunity; or respond to need and demand as identified through public consultation."

With a definition like that "high-value" could mean literally anything: if you collect a piece of data that is not to "further the core mission of the agency" why are you collecting it?

When you define a concept too broadly you end up not defining it at all. If we could roll back the clock on the Open Government Directive we would ask agencies to first list all data they collect and then create sub-lists of:

• data that is currently public but not online
• data that is currently public and online
• data that is not currently online but that will be put online and when
• for everything else, explain why it won't be put online

This would give us an instant picture of what the online (and therefore, public) landscape of federal government looks like and is an invaluable data set in its own right.

HHS, NASA, Education, National Archives and Records Administration and the Office of Personnel Management were the high water marks.

Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, State, Interior, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, US Agency for International Development and the Social Security Administration did not identify any new data to be made available - no inventories either.

Yes, I appreciate the extraordinary hard work put into the Open Government Directive by all those in the agencies and those spearheading it at Office of Management and Budget and the White House, and I wouldn't suggest that evaluating these plans based on just one of a couple dozen appropriate criteria is a totally fair reading of how successful this exercise was, but I have to look at it from what I feel is key for government accountability - data. That's my lens on the world.

We'll continue to evaluate agency plans all next week.

NOTES:

*We arrived at the 89 number via a very generous methodology. It all depends on how you define a "data set". Our complete inventory using a more exact methodology will be available soon.

Photo credit: "Idling" by Flickr user N1NJ4.

I wrote yesterday that we'd be going through agencies' new open government plans to evaluate their compliance with the data-related requirements. Here's what we've found so far:

Agencies have generally met the requirement to inventory their high value data that is currently available for download.

Many agencies, however, have not identified high-value datasets with specific goals for when they will be released.  This is the requirement I'll focus on in this post, since it shows how differently agencies are interpreting some of the Directive's requirements.

By my count, 18 of the 30 agency plans I checked fulfilled this requirement -- to identify high value data for future publication, leaving 12 agencies that did not.  To follow my evaluation of each agency's inventory of new data, here's the Google Spreadsheet I used to record my observations.  (Commerce's plan was linking to an error page as I checked through them.  Otherwise, I followed the agency list as available on the White House Open Government Dashboard, and used the helpful links to plans the GovLoop compiled here.)

The requirement in question from the Directive is in the section defining the components of the plans:

A strategic action plan for transparency that... (3) identifies high value information not yet available and establishes a reasonable timeline for publication online in open formats with specific target dates.

Importantly, the requirement is not a requirement for a strategic action plan for identifying information, but a strategic action plan that identifies information.  In other words, as I wrote yesterday, a plan to plan is insufficient.

Many agencies plans agree with this interpretation -- requiring specific identification of data that they'll be making public, with dates for when that will happen.  Some even linked their inventory of new data to the part of the Directive that requires it.

When agencies did fulfill this requirement, some did so questionably, and some quite admirably.  Some agencies are at the margins of compliance, like DOT, that thematically mentions kinds of data they'll consider publishing, or the Department of Labor, that specifically mentions a number of new datasets, but qualifies them by saying they're "examples of the types of data" that they will publish.

Agencies with the best lists of new data they'll publish include the NRC, with a very detailed appendix, NASA, with precision, and HHS, with 14 new datasets.

Of the agencies that didn't comply with this requirement, perhaps DoD is the most disappointing, since they encompass so significant a portion of our federal budget, and have an enormous number of datasets to choose from.

Despite the mixed compliance with this specific provision of the Open Government Directive, the Directive itself continues to deliver an enormous seachange in how our federal government relates to its information, and to the public at large.

If some agencies have not delivered this particular requirement, that means it's time for everyone -- agencies, the White House, and the public at large, to work towards a comprehensive accounting for our government's information.  If fully implemented in good faith, even DoD's plan for an eventual inventory of their data could prove to be as fundamentally transformative as anything else the directive requires, releasing an empowering deluge of vital national information.

Having mixed or varied compliance with key components does make it harder to evaluate agencies' performance.  It isn't a trivial task to differentiate between legitimate struggling with complex problems (on one hand), and meaningless bureaucratic defense against fundamental change (on the other).  Clear expectations are one antidote against this problem.  Another is continued effort on the part of both the White House and all the agencies.

As White House and agency officials keep referring to these plans (and the Directive) as Version 1.0.  This is entirely appropriate for an ongoing, complex task like remaking our federal government's relationship to public information.  This appeal to an iterative approach, and to "living documents," however, can also be a sign of softening expectations.  To live up to the potential of 21st Century disclosure rather than settling for less, we've all got a lot of work to do.

Comprehensive, aggressive inventories of public data are a great place to start.