US Open Government Directive Update

Kayt Robinson
June 2010

At the end of 2009, President Barack Obama announced the Open Government Directive, a direct result of his first official act after his inauguration. In doing so, the President committed to "creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government" in order to "strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government".

Just over six months on, whether or not these hefty aspirations have been attained is subjective and open to debate.

The Open Government Directive, announced on 8 December 2009, required every Federal department to develop and publish Open Government Plans by 7 April 2010. These plans were to provide concrete and specific roadmaps for making operations and data more transparent, and expanding opportunities for citizen participation, collaboration and oversight.

The Directive required that the Chief Technology Officer and Chief information Officer create an Open Government Dashboard to assess the state of open government. It tracks agency progress on the deliverables set out in the Directive, including each agency's Open Government Plan

Each plan was evaluated against 10 criteria:

• High-value data
• Data integrity
• Open webpage
• Public consultation
• Overall plan
• Formulating the Plan
• Transparency
• Participation
• Collaboration
• Flagship Initiative

The evaluations of each Federal department's Plan can be found on the White House's Open Government Initiative website at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/around.

The data showed that, according to the Government's own evaluations, all agencies either met expectations or were progressing towards expectations with each of the 10 criteria. No agencies were considered to fail to meet expectations for any criterion.

However, an independent coalition came to quite a different conclusion.

OpenTheGovernment.org¹, its partners, and others used the requirements outlined in the Directive to evaluate the Open Government Plans, and assess whether they live up to both the Directive and the spirit of the requirements. The audit was completed between April 12 and April 23, using new media tools that involved a number of evaluators from multiple organisations.

The independent audit took into account the ten criteria specified by the Open Government Directive, as well as the requirement that agencies produced a plan within the four month deadline, from the date the Directive was announced.

The evaluations rated the extent to which agencies met the administration's criteria. It also provided bonus points for the types of actions that are included in a rigorous set of standards under development by good government groups, which include measures such as regularly posting inspector general reports and agency visitor logs.

The OpenTheGovernment.org audit ranked the strongest and weakest agency plans (https://sites.google.com/site/opengovtplans/home/final-rankings-1), with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the top of the list and the Department of Justice at the bottom. The audit also revealed that several agencies that are supposed to lead by example on government openness failed to do so in their Open Government Plans.

The five lowest scores, from the independent audit, went to the Department of Treasury, Department of Defence, Office of Management and Budget, Department of Energy, and the Department of Justice. Evaluators noted particular disappointment to the low ranking of plans developed by the Office of Management and Budget and Department of Justice.

Given that Office of Management and Budget has responsibility overseeing sections of the Open Government Directive, the evaluators had expected the agency to seize this opportunity to lead by example. Similarly, the Department of Justice's ranking at the bottom is disappointing given its charge to implement the Freedom of Information Act, America's oldest public access law, and Attorney General Eric Holder's guidance to federal agencies in 2009, which stated his strong support for President Obama's commitment to open government.

The difference in the results from the US Government's own evaluations and the evaluations conducted by OpenTheGovernment.org, considering they were using the same Plans and criteria, raises some questions about how they could have come up with such different results.

Time and further evaluations of the Plans may be the answer.

Open Source for America (OSFA) represents more than 1,600 businesses, associations, non-governmental organisations, communities, and academic/research institutions who have come together to support and guide federal efforts to make the US Government more open through the use of free and open source software. In early June, OSFA announced its sponsorship of a study to measure openness in government. The study will look at openness and transparency across federal agencies and will culminate in a report card assigning a grade to each federal agency based on its public transparency, participation and collaboration.

Factors OSFA will evaluate include Freedom of Information Act processes, public access to agency documents, use of online public participation tools, and technology procurement procedures, among others. Agency representatives from the Administration's newly formed Open Government Working Group will be invited to participate in the study.

The study will be released later this year and may help to shed light on how well Obama's Open Government Directive is actually doing.

See also our article on Government–Community Engagement.