White House.gov Blog Feed: Open Government Blog

Recap: A Big Day for Open Data

Nick Sinai and Haley Van Dyck — Mon, 13 May 2013 21:51:17 +0000

This article is cross-posted from the OSTP blog

Yesterday, President Obama visited Austin, Texas, to kick off his Middle Class Jobs and Opportunity Tour. At Capital Factory, a local start-up incubator, he met with technology entrepreneurs and innovative companies that are helping grow our economy and create jobs by building new products and services.

One of those companies, Stormpulse, uses freely available government weather data to help businesses protect themselves and their assets from potentially hazardous weather. Stormpulse CEO Matt Wensing has said that “open government data is one of the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Easier access to government data means growing companies like ours can offer significant value to citizens and enterprises.”

President Barack Obama watches CEO Matt Wensing demonstrate Stormpulse during a tour of Capital Factory in Austin, Texas, May 9, 2013. Capital Factory founder Josh Baer and Todd Park, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, watch at right. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Indeed, earlier in the day, in a major step to provide innovative companies like Stormpulse with increased access to government data, the President signed a groundbreaking Executive Order and published a new open data policy requiring that going forward, data generated by the government be made available in open, machine-readable formats, while appropriately safeguarding privacy, confidentiality, and security.

In remarks yesterday at another innovative Austin-based company, Applied Materials, President Obama said:

“And today I’m announcing that we’re making even more government data available, and we’re making it easier for people to find and to use. And that’s going to help launch more start-ups. It’s going to help launch more businesses…It’s going to help more entrepreneurs come up with products and services that we haven’t even imagined yet. This kind of innovation and ingenuity has the potential to transform the way we do almost everything.”

Many innovators, entrepreneurs, and open government leaders across the country have embraced these historic steps. Below are selected statements of support:

Scott Chacon, Evangelist, GitHub: “Communities have been using GitHub for years to create software code, and it's amazing to see those practices, practices that embody a culture of openness, egalitarianism, and transparency being applied to the creation of White House’s Open Data policy as well. Technology is increasingly allowing us to blur the line between government and the public, bringing us to a tipping point where it is easier to work together than alone. If this is just the start, I can't wait to see where putting this kind of collaborative cultural technology in the hands of the already vibrant open government community is going to take us next.”

Ron Conway, Special Adviser to SV Angel: "The President has taken an historic step in making government more open and accessible to the people, just as the Founders intended. As tech entrepreneurs improve our lives through transformative innovations, open government data will be an important tool in their success."

David Eaves, Public Policy Entrepreneur, Open Government Activist, and Negotiation Expert: “The new "open data by default" executive order shows not only the White House's continued commitment to being a world leader in open data, but an effort to foster a 21st century government that is both more efficient and a more effective servant to the private, public and non-profit sectors. Two things leave me particularly excited. The executive order positions both the United States government to be leaner and its economy to be more productive thanks to the reduced transaction costs of sharing open data. The emphasis on health, energy and safety data could improve lives and save money if entrepreneurs enable citizens to access this important information at key decision making moments.”

Hudson Hollister, Executive Director of the Data Transparency Coalition: "Open data, as the White House has defined it, will transform our government - by automating reporting processes; by bringing appropriators and managers granular spending and performance knowledge; and by enabling analytics to detect waste and fraud. Open data will also boost our economy - by providing actionable intelligence for investors; by streamlining compliance to energize private-sector productivity; and by creating untold opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to build the platforms and apps that will do all these things. Our members are eager to help implement the ambitious road map the Open Data Policy has laid out."

Carl Malamud, President, PublicResource.Org: “This memorandum is the most significant advance in information policies by the federal government since the passage of the Freedom of Information Act."

Sean Moulton, Director of Open Government Policy at the Center for Effective Government: “President Obama's executive order reaffirms the administration's commitment to transparency and lays a framework for agencies to improve public access to, and use of, government data. For too long, valuable public information has been locked away in file cabinets and poorly designed IT systems. Today's policy points a new way forward and takes concrete steps to make public information open by default. Properly implemented, this policy will allow Americans to know more about their government's activities and critical issues that affect their lives, including public health, safety, and the environment. Access to this information is crucial to our democracy and the government's effectiveness. It allows Americans to actively engage in policymaking in a thoughtful, informed manner and to hold public officials accountable for decisions that impact us all.”

Beth Noveck, Founder and CEO, GovLab (and former US Deputy CTO):“The President's steadfast commitment to open government makes clear that the public's information must be accessible and reusable. Open data enables people to help government solve problems. We're on our way to tackling the hardest problem of all: rebuilding trust and partnership between government and citizens.”

Tim O’Reilly, Founder of O’Reilly Media (via Twitter): “Open data is to the 21st century as the highway system was to the 20th. POTUS recognizes this with an executive order…”

Kevin Richards, Senior Vice President of Federal Government Affairs, TechAmerica: “Access to the monumental amount of government data will fuel untold numbers of new innovative ideas in this country. By making open data the default policy of the entire federal government instead of discretionary, President Obama has handed the U.S. technology industry a key to expand our global leadership in this era of Big Data.”

Yaron Samid, Founder & CEO, BillGuard: “BillGuard is a national transaction monitoring and resolution network fueled by private and public sector consumer complaint data. Today's groundbreaking executive order to open government data will put millions of hard earned dollars back in the pockets of American citizens. We're grateful and proud of this forward-thinking administration and inspired by all the innovation that will come from today's order. Data drives innovation. Innovation drives economies.”

Jennifer Toney, CEO, WeMakeItSafer: “WeMakeItSafer builds web applications to help bridge the safety-information gap between manufacturers and their end-user customers. Since launching about two years ago and growing almost purely by word of mouth, our web apps have been used by a million people, preventing an estimated 3,000 injuries. We would not have been able to accomplish this without the availability of government data related to product safety and recalls. We are thrilled that President Obama continues to make open data a priority and, with his recent Executive Order, we know that we will be able to more efficiently add new features and applications to better serve US consumers and companies in the future.”

John Wonderlich, Policy Director, Sunlight Foundation: “We're thrilled that the President (and some very dedicated staff) have been listening, and are aggressively pursuing a strong vision for what open data should mean. Changing the default to open takes more than political commitments and enthusiastic rhetoric, and today's new policies mark a new aggressive move to pursue that idea.”

Nick Sinai is US Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Haley Van Dyck is Senior Advisor to the US Chief Information Officer at the White House Office of Management and Budget

Open Government: A Time for Self-Assessment

Lisa Ellman and Todd Park — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 13:45:23 +0000

This article was originally published on the White House Blog

The role of citizens in our democracy does not end with your vote. America’s never been about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us together through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government.” -- President Barack Obama, November 7, 2012

Since the first day of the Obama Administration, the Federal government has worked to make government more efficient, effective, and responsive to citizens’ needs. The Administration has harnessed new technology to engage the public, worked to disclose information more quickly, and given citizens a greater voice in decision-making.

In September 2011, the Administration’s work was launched on the world stage when President Obama and other world leaders endorsed the principles of the global Open Government Partnership (OGP). As part of our commitment to OGP, the United States launched the National Action Plan, a set of twenty-six concrete commitments that help increase public integrity, promote public participation, manage public resources more effectively, and improve public services. Praised by civil society organizations and the public, the Plan stands as a great example of what we can do as a country when government, civil society, and the public collaborate together. As the President has said, “Put simply, our countries are stronger when we engage citizens beyond the halls of government.”

Today, we are proud to report that the United States has fulfilled twenty-four of those commitments. You can read more about the implementation of our National Action Plan here. Some highlights include:

We the People provides the American people a way to connect with the Obama Administration on the issues that matter most to them. The online platform allows anyone to create or sign a petition asking the Administration to take action on an issue. If a petition gets enough signatures, the White House issues an official response. Since its launch, 7.2 million people created more than 11.6 million signatures on more than 178,000 petitions; more than 30 percent of these users signed petitions that reached enough signatures to receive a response.
With the passage of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act and President Obama’s landmark directive extending whistleblower protections to the intelligence and national security communities for the first time, Federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government will better receive the protections they deserve.
In the interest of transparency, and to ensure that American taxpayers are receiving every dollar due for the extraction of their natural resources, President Obama announced the U.S. commitment to implement the international standard known as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The United States has formed its multi-stakeholder group of government, industry and public stakeholders, which is working collaboratively to fulfill the final EITI sign-up requirement: completion of a candidacy application that will lay out an implementation plan for the next few years.
As part of the Administration’s Open Data Initiatives, thousands of government data resources across fields such as health and medicine, education, energy, public safety, global development, and finance have been posted in machine-readable form for free public use on Data.gov. Entrepreneurs and innovators are developing a vast range of new products and businesses using these public information resources – helping to improve the lives of Americans in many tangible ways, and creating good jobs in the process.

But there is always more work that can be done. Opening government takes time, effort, and resources, and the Obama Administration remains committed to continuing this work in the second term.

In the coming months, we will continue to work to complete the initiatives in the National Action Plan. In addition, we are excited to announce that the U.S. is committing to release a second Open Government National Action Plan later this year.

As we develop this new National Action Plan, we will engage members of the public and open government advocates in a variety of ways – from in-person consultations to online dialogues. We will let you know about these opportunities to engage as they become available and we will also post information at whitehouse.gov/open and on Twitter @OpenGov. We hope that you will take an active role in contributing ideas for our next plan.

Together, we will work to continue to empower public participation in policy dialogues, release information that spurs innovation and helps citizens hold government accountable, and make government more efficient and responsive. This is, as the President has said, “the essence of democracy,” and the cause that we re-commit ourselves to today.

Lisa Ellman is Chief Counselor for the Open Government Partnership and Senior Advisor to the US Chief Technology Officer

Todd Park is Assistant to the President and US Chief Technology Officer

Sunshine Week: Increasing Access to Publicly Funded Research

Nick Sinai and Mike Stebbins — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:38:36 +0000

Ed. Note: This post is part of a Sunshine Week series on whitehouse.gov. Sunshine Week is a national initiative to celebrate and focus on government transparency and open government.

During Sunshine Week, we celebrate the ways government can improve public use of government information. Much of the discussion this week has been on steps the Administration has taken to liberate government-owned data, but we recently took an equally important step to increase public access to the results of research funded by the Federal Government. Last month, John Holdren, President Obama’s science and technology advisor and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, issued a memo to the heads of Federal agencies with research and development budgets over $100 million requiring them to draft plans to dramatically increase public access to the results of the research they support. The memo focused on two key products of funded research: peer-reviewed scholarly publications and scientific data.

The rationale for the policy was made plain in a Web posting by Dr. Holdren in response to a We the People petition that called for the government to develop such a policy—a petition, incidentally, that garnered more than 65,000 signatures!

“We know that scientific research supported by the Federal Government spurs scientific breakthroughs and economic advances when research results are made available to innovators,” Dr. Holdren wrote. “Policies that mobilize these intellectual assets for re-use through broader access can accelerate scientific breakthroughs, increase innovation, and promote economic growth… Americans should have easy access to the results of research they help support.”

As a result of the Administration’s policy, more than 20 Federal agencies will, within the next six months, produce draft plans describing how they will make the peer-reviewed published results of federally funded research available to the public. As further described in Dr. Holdren’s memo, we established a guideline of twelve-months following publication for research results to be made available and, once implemented, this will be one of the largest steps ever taken to increase free access to the results of research that taxpayers paid for.

That alone would be an historic step forward, but the Administration has taken a similarly strong stance on the importance of preserving and mobilizing data created in the course of federally funded scientific research. Reflecting this priority, Dr. Holdren’s memo also directs agencies to “maximize access, by the general public and without charge…scientific data created with Federal funds.” As a starting point, agency policies will require scientists applying for Federal funds to craft data management plans detailing how they will preserve and provide access to the data they produce. Importantly, these plans will be peer-reviewed to ensure they fulfill the spirit of the policy. And in recognition that data management and sharing take effort, scientists will be allowed to budget for the management of data in their future research proposals.

Taken together, the Administration’s new public access and data management policies provide a powerful new means of leveraging openness to drive America’s knowledge economy—by making information more readily available to teachers, students, entrepreneurs, and other innovators, and by creating new markets for services related to data curation, preservation, analysis, and reuse.

Read the OSTP Policy Memorandum here.
Read the We the People petition response here.

Nick Sinai is US Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy

Mike Stebbins is Assistant Director for Biotechnology at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy

Sunshine Week: In Celebration of Transparency

Lisa Ellman and Rhea Suh — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:20:12 +0000

Ed. Note: This post is part of a Sunshine Week series on WhiteHouse.gov. Sunshine Week is a national initiative to celebrate and focus on government transparency and open government.

Sunshine Week is about the importance of transparency, and the public’s right to know what its government is doing. That philosophy has been at the core of the Obama Administration from Day One, and over the last four years we’ve let a lot of sunshine in—including in some domains that are not widely known to the general public but are nonetheless important and deserving of illumination.

In one representative example, the U.S. Government in September 2011 committed to implement the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI)—a voluntary, global effort designed to increase transparency, strengthen the accountability of natural resource revenues, and build public trust for the governance of these vital activities. Sunshine Week is a good time to reflect on the notable steps the Administration has taken in the last year-and-a-half to fulfill its commitment to implement EITI, which was launched as part of the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan.

In the true spirit of EITI and the Open Government Partnership, we endeavored from the start to undertake this effort in a collaborative and inclusive fashion, engaging government, the private sector, civil society, and the public. We began with a comprehensive stakeholder assessment, which involved two public comment periods, a webinar, a public workshop, and public listening sessions in Anchorage, Denver, Houston, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. We conducted tribal consultations at meetings of the National Congress of American Indians, the Alaska Federation of Natives, and tribal advisory committees, and we met with individual tribes engaged in resource extraction. We also consulted with and learned from our counterparts in other countries who have already implemented EITI, to garner best practices.

As a result, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar last July established, and sought nominations for, a Federal Advisory Committee to serve as the U.S. EITI multi-stakeholder group tasked with overseeing U.S. implementation of EITI. Through October, government agencies and Members of Congress, as well as companies and industry associations, academics, and public interest organizations nominated representatives to serve on the Committee. And in December, Secretary Salazar appointed 21 members and 20 alternates, culminating our efforts to bring together representatives of very diverse constituencies, with a wide range of experience for the common purpose of promoting extractive revenue transparency for the American people.

Last month, Secretary Salazar hosted the inaugural meeting of this multi-stakeholder Committee, marking the beginning of an intensive, multi-year process in which we will jointly develop standards and mechanisms for publicly reporting extractive revenue data in ways that are meaningful to the public we serve. The Administration is fully committed to supporting the EITI multi-stakeholder process and working collaboratively toward full implementation of this important initiative in the United States. In so doing, we will foster a more participatory, transparent, and accountable government.

Lisa Ellman is the Chief Counselor for the Open Government Partnership at OSTP

Rhea Suh is the Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget at the U.S. Department of the Interior. She serves as the USEITI National Coordinator and Chair of the USEITI Multi-Stakeholder Group

Sunshine Week: In Celebration of Civic Engagement

Macon Phillips — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:10:37 +0000

This article was originally posted to whitehouse.gov

Ed. Note: This post is part of our Sunshine Week series on the blog. Sunshine Week is a national initiative to celebrate and focus on government transparency and open government.

We have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and the wisdom, energy, and creativity of the American public is the nation’s greatest asset. Sunshine Week seeks to encourage public participation in government, and the U.S. has worked hard to expand opportunities for civic engagement. As one example of this, We the People gives the Obama Administration a way to connect with the public on the issues that matter most to them.

We the People allows anyone to create or sign a petition asking the Administration to take action on an issue. If the petition gets enough signatures, the Administration issues an official response.

Since its creation, 7.2 million people have logged more than 11.6 million signatures on more than 178,000 petitions on issues ranging from education to immigration to tax policy.Beyond the sheer volume of participation, We the People has demonstrated that the Administration is responsive to the questions and concerns of the public — even if they are not necessarily the issues that the Administration talks about every day.

In many cases, petitions posted on We the People have helped spur discussions of important policy issues at the White House and across the Administration, and serve as a catalyst for change. We’ve also used the platform to announce new directions in policy or to continue a dialogue with people who have an interest in this issue. Read the full post...

Sunshine Week: All Hands on Deck for Open Data

Nick Sinai — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:00:18 +0000

This article was originally posted on whitehouse.gov

This post is part of a Sunshine Week series on WhiteHouse.gov. Sunshine Week is a national initiative to celebrate and focus on government transparency and open government.

On Monday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the launch of open.ny.gov, a new data transparency website that features valuable information about New York State economic development, recreation, and public services. The announcement is an important contribution to the growing “all hands on deck” effort to make government data accessible as fuel for innovation and economic growth.

Unleashing “Open Data”—data freely available in formats that are easy to use in new and innovative ways, while rigorously protecting privacy—has been a priority for the Obama Administration since the beginning. As the President has said, “information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.”

In addition to catalyzing entrepreneurship, innovation, scientific discovery, and other public benefits, Open Data also helps ensure a transparent, accountable, and open government—goals being celebrated across the Nation this week as part of Sunshine Week.

A great example of an Open Data resource that has led to concrete benefits for citizens and the economy is weather data/the Global Positioning System. Since being made freely available, beginning decades ago, entrepreneurs and innovators have used these information sources to create navigation systems, weather newscasts and warning systems, location-based apps, precision farming tools, and much more.

In recent years, the Administration’s Open Data Initiatives have helped make thousands of other government data resources in health and medicine, education, energy, public safety, global development, and finance freely available in machine-readable formats through the platform Data.gov. Entrepreneurs and innovators use these public information resources to develop a vast range of new products, services, and businesses while journalists, civil society, and the public use them to gain new insights into markets, the government, and our democracy.

We’re continuing to make progress in the Open Data arena. Under the leadership of the Presidential Innovation Fellows, the Administration recently launched Alpha.Data.gov as an experimental first step in reimagining the next iteration of Data.gov—which will soon feature enhanced search capabilities that make it easier to find datasets held anywhere in the Federal Government.

At the same time, we’re also working to make it easier for people to securely access their own data and use innovative applications to crunch those data for a growing array of useful purposes. For example, the Administration’s “MyData” initiatives are already helping Americans get easy and secure access to their own private health, education, and energy data—such as medical records, transcripts, and utility bills—in standard consumer- and computer-friendly formats, from wherever those data currently live.

In order for these efforts to succeed, making data machine-readable is an absolutely necessary step. But the work doesn’t end there. Data must also be made available in smart ways that are useful to end-users: consumers, businesses, entrepreneurs, and innovators. That’s where the “all hands on deck” approach comes in.

We are collaborating closely with civil society, non-profit organizations, entrepreneurs, and other innovators to ensure that Federal Open Data resources are as accessible and useful as possible for Americans and people around the world. We have put out calls for entrepreneurs and citizen solvers to use Open Data to create new solutions, products, and services that solve tough problems, create jobs, and benefit Americans, through the nearly 250 incentive prizes and challenges offered to date by more than 50 Federal departments and agencies on Challenge.gov. We also encourage regional and community-based Open Data efforts like open.ny.gov which empower citizens with information resources that are immediately relevant and useful to them.

By continuing to work together and put all hands on deck, we can keep Open Data flowing for the benefit of all Americans.

Happy Sunshine Week!

Nick Sinai is the Deputy US Chief Technology Officer at OSTP

Sunshine Week: In Celebration of Open Government

Lisa Ellman and Melanie Ann Pustay — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:43:36 +0000

This article was originally published on whitehouse.gov

This post is the first in a Sunshine Week series on whitehouse.gov. Sunshine Week is a national initiative to celebrate and focus on government transparency and open government.

As President Barack Obama has stated, "Openness will strengthen our democracy, and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government." This week, we celebrate Sunshine Week -- an appropriate time to discuss the importance of open government and freedom of information, and to take stock of how far we have come, and think about what more can be done.

Over the last few weeks, we have asked for your feedback on some of our open government efforts, and you have responded, whether in meetings with civil society or viaQuora, or a web form on WhiteHouse.gov. We thank you for taking the time to talk to us about this important work, and we hear you – and we will continue to consult with you.

In the spirit of Sunshine Week, the White House will highlight one initiative a day which demonstrates the Obama Administration’s continued commitment to open and accessible government. Today, we will focus on progress made improving the administration of the FOIA. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." In our democracy, FOIA, which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government.

As President Obama declared in his landmark Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) issued on his first full day in Office: “A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.” The FOIA – which provides the public with a statutory right to request and receive information from their government – is a key way in which government transparency is realized.

Over the past four years agencies have been working hard to improve their administration of the FOIA under guidance issued by Attorney General Holder. That guidance directed agencies to apply a presumption of openness in responding to requests and to make it a priority to respond promptly. Both the President and Attorney General stressed that it is also vital for agencies to make information available proactively, without the need to make a request, so that what is “known and done by their Government” is readily available to all. These directives are taking hold across the agencies and real improvements are being made.

In Fiscal Year 2012, the government as a whole:

Processed more FOIA requests: Agencies processed 665,924 total requests. This is a 5.5 percent increase over the total number of requests processed last fiscal year.
Decreased the FOIA request backlog: The efforts of agencies to increase the numbers of requests processed has paid off as the government was able to reduce its backlog of pending requests by 14 percent from last year. The current backlog marks a 45 percent reduction from the backlog that existed four years ago in 2008.
Maintained a release rate above 92 percent for the fourth straight year: Of the 464,985 requests processed by agencies for disclosure, the government released records either in full or in part in response to 93.4 percent of these requests. For half of those requests all the information was released, with nothing withheld. This marks the fourth year in a row where the number of responses to FOIA requests providing a release of information either in full or in part exceeded 92 percent of the requests processed for disclosure.
Improved average processing times: Agencies improved the average processing times for all categories of requests.
Disclosed more information proactively: Agencies met public demand for information by posting a wide range of material on their websites, allowing the public to easily find information of interest without the need to make a FOIA request.

All of the detailed data on agency FOIA compliance from Fiscal Year 2012 is compiled and displayed graphically on the Department of Justice’s government FOIA website FOIA.gov, providing a clear picture of government FOIA administration and progress during the last fiscal year.

These are more than just statistics. They represent the efforts of agencies across the government to answer the call to improve transparency. They demonstrate that agencies are responding to requests more quickly and releasing more information when they do. Agencies are reducing backlogs of pending requests and helping eliminate the need to even make requests by proactively providing information online. The public is the beneficiary of this progress. While there is more work to be done, this past year demonstrates that agencies are answering the President’s and Attorney General’s call for greater transparency.

Lisa Ellman is Chief Counselor for the Open Government Partnership at OSTP

Melanie Ann Pustay is Director of the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice.

Fulfilling our Commitment to Open Government

Lisa Ellman and Nick Sinai — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:32:25 +0000

Since taking office, President Obama has made clear that his Administration is committed to Open Government—that the Nation is made stronger by making the Federal Government accountable to citizens and by giving those citizens opportunities to participate in their government.

That’s why, in September 2011, President Obama, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, and the leaders of six other governments launched the global Open Government Partnership – a global effort to encourage transparent, effective, and accountable governance driven by citizens and civil society around the world. Demonstrating the Nation’s domestic commitment to the Partnership, President Obama launched the U.S. National Action Plan on Open Government that same day, saying:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/image/quote_rule.png); background-attachment: scroll; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat repeat;">

“We pledge to be more transparent at every level -- because more information on government activity should be open, timely, and freely available to the people. We pledge to engage more of our citizens in decision-making -- because it makes government more effective and responsive. We pledge to implement the highest standards of integrity -- because those in power must serve the people, not themselves. And we pledge to increase access to technology -- because in this digital century, access to information is a right that is universal.”

The Code for Livability Rocks On

Chris Vein — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 16:45:51 +0000

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of participating in the first Code for Livability event in Washington, DC. An incredible group of policy makers, community leaders, and web developers came together with the purpose of developing strategies to sustain communities across the country. From this first meeting, amazing ideas and conceptual designs for smart-phone applications were generated with the goal of bringing environmental sustainability to the forefront of peoples’ everyday lives.

This weekend in Denver, Colorado, coders and designers will build on the success of the Code for Livability event, converging on the Uncubed coworking space to participate in the Colorado Code for Communities civic “hackathon”. One of the first civic hacking events in the region, this event will bring together non-profits, local foundations, local and regional government agencies, Federal agencies, and private local tech startups and entrepreneurs. “Hackathons” like this one bring together a number of people to build web and mobile applications and other products to help improve communities. They happen in one whirlwind weekend and this one will result in two or three winning teams and applications.

Funded in part by the Obama Administration’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities Technical Assistance Grant awarded to a team led by PlaceMatters, this event has helped catalyze a community of individuals interested in innovating around community sustainability. Already, ahead of the “hackathon,” the City of Denver released 80 GIS datasets into a truly open data Denver catalog. This means citizens, planners, students and anyone else can download these geographical data sets without lengthy forms or clearances. This furthers the region’s ability to bring down the costs of regional and urban planning analysis (one of the long-term goals of building regional capacities throughout the country).

Over the past couple of years the term civic hacking has come into greater use. Civic hackathons like this one in Denver are inspired by Code for America’s call for a different kind of public service. America’s tech-savvy workforce loves a challenge and these hackathons and other similar opportunities give people an outlet for giving back and volunteering time. For example, the iFindit app aims to assist social workers, case managers, providers, and residents with quick information on food, shelter, and medical care for Chicago’s underprivileged, in addition to information on location, hours of operation, and whether services are provided free of charge. And the NYC Volunteer Opportunities Finder gives you easy access to volunteer opportunities based on location and type, making it easier than ever before to give back to your community. But opportunities like these are not just about volunteering service to local, regional, or Federal government. It’s about fostering connections among innovators who will also go out and build the next great businesses.

Colorado Code for Communities has been a community effort, led by PlaceMatters but not possible without the support of some gracious sponsors (many of them grown in Colorado): Full Contact, Bill Track 50, SendGrid, Granicus, and Pivotal Labs with additional support from Galvanize and Microsoft’s Boulder Office. Our partners at Open Colorado and the Denver Regional Council of Governments have also been instrumental in helping us organize and get data.

I look forward to other Code for Communities taking place around the country. Thinking about doing one? Write me at opengov@ostp.gov and let me know of your ideas.

Chris Vein is US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation

The Growing Open Government Movement

Chris Vein — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 20:39:57 +0000

The open government movement—which has emphasized transparency, collaboration, and participation at the Federal, state, and local levels—is finding increasing application on the international and diplomatic stage, as evidenced most recently by the launch of the Open Government Platform, which aims to promote government transparency and citizen engagement on a global scale.

The Open Government Platform (OGPL) is a global initiative founded by the governments of India and the United States to make more government data, documents, tools, and processes publicly accessible through development and distribution of a freely available, open source on-line platform. By making these data available in useful machine-readable formats, the OGPL platform allows developers, analysts, media, and academia to gain new insights and develop novel applications that will enhance delivery of information and services to citizens and enable more informed decision-making.

At last week’s U.S.-India Joint Commission Meeting on Science and Technology, OSTP Director and Presidential science and technology advisor John Holdren and Dr. Sam Pitroda, Adviser to Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovation, launched the second phase of the OGPL, which makes the platform freely available to other governments. As OGPL becomes more widely adopted, it will allow developers and civil society groups use government data to create innovative applications that help citizens and governments work together across the world. Because OGPL uses an open-source method of development, the entire OGPL community will be able to contribute to future technology enhancements, open government solutions, and community-based technical support.

Also last week, in an agreement negotiated by the Indian government, it was announced that Rwanda has signed on as the first of two pilot countries. The United States is currently reviewing possible candidates and is expected to announce the second pilot country soon. Over the next six months, the joint U.S.- India team that created the OGPL will work with additional countries to unleash the power of open government using the worldwide open source community.

India and the United States have already committed to use OGPL for their respective data.gov portals and the US data.gov portal is already using portions of OGPL functionality. OGPL has released the open source code for the project, and both the United States and India expect to deploy OGPL this year based on feedback from the open source community.

The Open Government Platform exemplifies the belief that transparency, participation, and collaboration are universal concepts applicable to all levels of government in countries around the world.

Chris Vein is Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Helping our Nation’s Cities Through Open Government and Innovation

Chris Vein — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 21:13:05 +0000

Cities around the country are facing challenges, from increasing service demands, to tight budgets, to aging infrastructure. But city leaders are increasingly finding new and innovative ways to tackle these challenges, in part by harnessing the inherent power of the citizens that live there.

Last week I was excited to join mayors in Orlando, Florida, for the 80^th meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM). I joined San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, former U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, and Jen Pahlka, executive director of Code for America, to launch the Open Government Innovation Partnership. The Partnership’s premise is simple: a founding group of city governments embrace a set of high-level open innovation principles, pledge city-specific commitments for implementing those principles, agree to share best practices, and invite a coalition of third-party organizations to assess progress. As more cities join the Partnership, we’ll see a nationwide network of innovative of cities creating shareable tools that will help government innovate like never before.

But what exactly is open government innovation? It is a rapidly growing movement, combining the principles of open government (i.e. transparency, participation, and collaboration) with open innovation (e.g. tapping citizen and government expertise) to create some of the most entrepreneurial solutions to problems cities face.

Already, we are seeing the power of open innovation in cities around America:

In Boston, the Mayor created an Office of New Urban Mechanics to drive civic innovation by exploring and building new ways to engage constituents in the design and delivery of services.
In San Francisco, the Mayor, along with the local community, created the San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation, a 501(c)6 organization created to leverage the power of the technology community around civic action in San Francisco.
In Louisville, the Mayor created The Asthma Data Innovation Project working with Asthmopolis and Walgreens to provide advanced inhalers to 500 residents to gather data and help city officials cut health care cost.

By tapping into the new Open Innovation Platform and the Innovation and Technology Task Force, cities around the country will have more opportunities to brainstorm with entrepreneurs and innovators in and out of government in order to scale successful solutions. That’s the power of innovation and the enduring ingenuity of the American spirit.

Chris Vein is Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation

The Power of Open Education Data

Todd Park and Jim Shelton — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 21:25:21 +0000

On Tuesday, Vice President Biden, U.S. Education Department Secretary Arne Duncan, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray hosted a roundtable with college presidents who pledged to provide clear, useful information to all incoming college students and their families, as part of their financial aid package, so that they can “know before they owe.”

The President has said keeping college affordable is a shared responsibility. That means the Federal government continuing to make Pell Grants available for low-income students and keeping loans available and affordable for all students who choose to borrow for college. It means states doing their fair share to fund colleges and universities instead of forcing schools to pass funding cuts onto students in the form of higher tuition. And it means postsecondary institutions innovating to find new ways to get students – including low-income students – across the finish line while keeping their costs down.

But it also means students and families voting with their feet – making choices about where to apply and where to enroll based on information about quality and affordability, such as graduation and loan default rates. That can help consumers get good value for their money, and put some competitive pressure on schools to provide a top-notch education for less.

Technology, data, and entrepreneurs can help with college affordability—as well as help address our national priorities in K-12 education.

That’s why we are excited about the Education Data Initiative, an Administration-wide effort to “liberate” government data and voluntarily-contributed non-government data as fuel to spur entrepreneurship, create value, and create jobs while improving educational outcomes for students. The Education Data Initiative is part of a recently announced series of Open Data Initiatives in energy, health care, public safety, and education to spark new private-sector consumer-facing and business-oriented tools, products, and services – such as mobile apps and websites– all while rigorously protecting personal, proprietary, and national security information.

Led by the U.S. Department of Education, in close partnership with the White House and other agencies, the Education Data Initiative seeks to (1) work with data owners inside and outside of government to make education-related data available, machine-readable, and accessible, while ensuring personal privacy is protected, and (2) collaborate with private-sector entrepreneurs and innovators to ensure they are aware of these existing and newly available digital assets and encourage them to include these data as inputs into their new products, services, and features that can improve student success.

For example, existing Federal databases of higher education information available on education.data.gov (e.g., institutional prices, graduation rates, loan default rates, etc.) can fuel new or improved online services that help students and their families make informed choices about which college to attend, based on indicators of affordability and quality. Similarly, making individual federal financial aid application and award data securely available to applicants and borrowers in machine-readable form promises to help customize and personalize college-choice tools and services.

The Education Data Initiative will also include efforts to encourage schools and their vendors to enable students to securely download electronic copies of their own transcript and assessment data, which can fuel personalized virtual tutorial offerings and other services to improve student learning. Making these data available to high-school students, for example, will enable them to create their own personal learning profile and connect to tools and resources to help improve their grades.

Additionally, the Education Data Initiative will include work to develop a common trust mechanism for schools that want to exchange student data with each other and other qualified parties, and to promote the newly developed Learning Registry—an open-source technical system to help educators and learners use and share digital content—which can help fuel the next generation of educational technology services and tools.

The President has challenged our Nation to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world, and for every American to receive at least one year of postsecondary education. College has never been more important, but it's also never been more expensive, and we have to make sure we keep college within reach of all families.

With the Education Data Initiative, we're empowering students with their own data, in a way that has the potential to help them make dramatically better choices about investing in higher education—where to go, how to pay for it, how to manage their debt if they borrow.

For the first time, students who apply for and receive Federal student aid will be able to receive their own data in machine-readable format. Instead of just seeing their data in a PDF or on a web page, they'll be able to download a simple text file. We're hoping to see the same functionality with the student aid award offers that schools provide students once they're admitted. The President has taken steps to make these letters easier to understand, and the Administration is in the process of finalizing a "shopping sheet" that institutions could adopt to allow students and families to easily compare offers from different institutions. Financial aid offices could allow students to download the shopping sheet in machine readable format, not just send paper copies that get spread out on the kitchen table.

If innovators and entrepreneurs respond—and the experience with health data and energy data makes us confident they will—students will be able to upload their downloadable federal student aid data and their downloadable financial aid award data from schools to a host of web-based tools that will offer customized scholarship searches, college comparisons, and loan repayment counseling to help them enroll in a school that will bring them across the finish line and prepare them for success in our increasingly competitive global economy.

Todd Park is the US Chief Technology Officer, and Jim Shelton is the Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education.

Innovations in Open Government that are Changing DOT

Chris Vein — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 21:29:29 +0000

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has been committed to advancing the principles of a more open government since Day One of this Administration—by harnessing the skills and talents of the American people, releasing information, establishing greater collaboration among Federal agencies, and improving how efficiently the agency carries out its mission.

The release of version 2.0 of DOT’s open government plan is a great opportunity to look at some of the great work that they’ve done since the last iteration.

Increasing Agency Transparency & Accountability

Information is power, so DOT has released useful information that they hold without sacrificing accuracy, security and privacy. This year DOT released an inventory of high value data in its possession. We know that citizens are interested in the information DOT possesses because there have been more than 40,000 views of DOT data sets on data.gov. DOT has also released Recovery Act data on overall spending, and Recovery Act spending on highway-specific projects, ensuring that taxpayers know that their dollars are spent wisely.

DOT is giving the public greater access to information through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The public now has access to the Department’s staffing and organizational structure, the process for analyzing requests, and an assessment of DOT’s capacity to handle FOIA requests. By the numbers, here’s what DOT’s FOIA program has accomplished in the past year:

8% reduction of backlog of initial requests in FY2011;
22% reduction of backlog of administrative appeals in FY2011:
72-day reduction in the age of DOT’s oldest pending initial request;
119-day reduction in the age of DOT’s oldest pending administrative appeal.

Lastly, DOT is taking the lead in implementing a key element of the President’s National Action Plan for Open Government: launching a public safety community on data.gov. The site will provide access to a wide variety of safety data and will help raise the profile of safety as a national health issue. It will inform stakeholders of community safety initiatives through the coordination, consolidation, and clustering of safety datasets. DOT will lead this partnership with the Department of Labor, the National Institute of Justice and the U.S. Coast Guard to ensure integration of the relevant public safety and occupational safety datasets.

Applying Citizen Knowledge to Government Service

Releasing information—while important—is not the whole story of how open government empowers citizens. DOT has been a leader in providing opportunities for public input into the creation of DOT policies and programs. Regulation Room, one of DOT’s flagship initiatives, provides an online environment to discuss and learn about regulations proposed by Federal agencies. It expands the types of public input available to agencies in the rulemaking process, while serving as a teaching and research platform. Over the past year, Regulation Room has had

Over 24,000 unique visitors to the site;
Over 1,000 comments from users of the site;
Over 50% of visitors who said they learned more about the rulemaking process;
Over 80% of visitors who said they learned more about the positions and arguments of others;
Over 75% of visitors who said they learned more about what DOT was trying to accomplish with rulemaking on airline passenger rights.

Collaboration and Culture Change

Finally, DOT has started to embed the culture of open government into all aspects of the agency’s work because the agency—from the top down—realizes that a more efficient and effective government that works for all citizens is the result of true collaboration across all levels of the public and private sector. That’s why DOT is collaborating with Federal agencies, the private sector, and other non-government organizations in providing the public with mission-related services such as the Digital Transportation Exchange, Code for Livability, and DOT’s customer service plan.

While the job is not complete, DOT has done an enormous amount of work to change how government interacts with citizens—working to ensure that government works for citizens, and not the other way around. Read DOT’s new plan and comment. They’d love to hear from you!

Chris Vein is Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer

NASA’s Open Government Plan Features the International Space Apps Challenge

Deborah Diaz — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:40:15 +0000

This week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released version 2.0 of our Open Government Plan. We used this milestone to sharpen our focus on initiatives such as creating a new web architecture, employing wider use of Open Source technologies, and increasing opportunities for engaging citizens in NASA’s mission. We also developed an online version of our plan that features a directory of more than 100 participatory, collaborative and transparency activities.

Our original plan contained a whopping 147 goals, with responsibility for implementation across twenty-two organizations. Each goal sought to integrate open government into every program and project at NASA. In the past two years, we have focused on implementation, embedding participation, collaboration, and transparency into all that we do. Among other accomplishments, NASA has released the open data platform data.nasa.gov; spearheaded the Centennial Challenges, which develop innovative solutions to technical challenges through competition and cooperation; and used technology to help solve some of the world’s most challenging problems through the Random Hacks of Kindness partnership. Check out this infographic, which provides the status of all the goals associated with version 1.0 of our plan.

One exciting new initiative in the revised plan is the International Space Apps Challenge. The Challenge will take place on April 21-22, in more than 25 cities and on all seven continents. It is a key feature of the new plan and fulfills a commitment included the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. The Apps Challenge brings collaboration and participation to a new level—quite literally, since even the Space Station is taking part!

The two-day event will be a “codeathon”-style event, bringing techy-savvy citizens, scientists, entrepreneurs, educators, and students together to help solve challenges relevant to both space exploration and social needs. To find out more information on the Apps Challenge, read NASA’s revised Open Government Plan at open.nasa.gov/plan, and visit http://spaceappschallenge.org, where you can find a number of diverse challenges that your help is needed to solve!

Deborah Diaz is Deputy Chief Information Officer at NASA

Celebrating the Release of Open Government Plans 2.0

Cass R. Sunstein and Chris Vein — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:45:54 +0000

We’ve come a long way since the President signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government on his first full day in office. One highlight of the Open Government Initiative has been the release of agency Open Government Plans. These plans have served as roadmaps for agencies working to expand opportunities for citizen participation, make data more available and transparent, and increase collaborative decision-making.

As the President has emphasized, open government promotes a range of important goals. The first goal is to increase accountability. As Justice Louis Brandeis stated, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” As government becomes more open, both private and public institutions are more likely to be held accountable. The second goal is to provide people with information that they can readily find and use in their daily lives. Important information is being disclosed to the American public in areas that involve product recalls, infant car seats, automobile safety, health care, energy, nutrition, air pollution, obesity, crime, and much more.

This information is being used by the private sector to create apps and otherwise to inform decisions. (See our recent emphasis on smart disclosure.) The third goal is to use the dispersed knowledge of the American people. As the President has said, “Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge.” Use of that information can improve rules and policies, including those that involve open government itself. (On improving rules and policies, see our recent redesign of regulations.gov.)

Since Open Government plans were released two years ago, a great deal of work has been doneon implementation. And today, agencies are releasing updates of their plans, which include timelines for completing the initiatives in their previous plans, as well as new commitments. We’ve continued to make agency plans a priority, stating in the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan that we would work with agencies as they implement their plans. We invite you to read each plan at www.[name of agency].gov/open.

Over the past three years, agencies have taken significant steps to incorporate the principles of open and accountable government into their daily work. Of course, implementing a plan can be harder than writing it. As a next step, agencies will receive feedback from the public, open government advocates, and their colleagues across government on their revised plans over the coming week. Then, they’ll make revisions based on that feedback.

This Administration has committed itself to being the most transparent and accountable in history. And while this is an ongoing process – a marathon, not a sprint – we are proud of our record, including our most recent accomplishments: smart disclosure initiatives, the redesign of regulations.gov, the launch of ethics.gov, the Open Government Platform, and the signing of the STOCK Act. We are committed to the long-term effort.

Cass R. Sunstein is Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Chris Vein is Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer

Pioneering Innovation Through Health Data Transparency

Todd Park — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:10:54 +0000

As advocates across the country celebrate Sunshine Week, a time to focus on government transparency, the Department of Health and Human Services is proud of its work in spearheading greater data transparency. Signature among our work in this area is the Health Data Initiative (HDI). Founded in early 2010, the HDI is a three-pronged effort to publish brand new HHS data for public access; use tools to that make existing HHS data much more accessible; and energetically market and promote our data to innovators who can creatively use it as raw material to develop applications and services to improve health. Based on the principles of improved access to data from all sectors of health and healthcare, collaboration by a wide array of organizations, and participation by many individuals, HDI is a powerful emerging catalyst for change. Remarkable insights are being gained into some of our most vexing challenges in health care, and new windows of opportunity are opening for an incredible array of data-fueled innovations that embody American ingenuity.

The key ingredients for the success of this HHS Open Government flagship initiative include policies that have enhanced access to a rapidly growing array of data resources and have resulted in the launch of a wide array of semi-annual data releases and reviews.

Additionally, HHS is upgrading its technology capabilities to improve the release of new datasets, and is modifying existing tools to support the growing community of data users. To engage the developer community, HHS has publicized data and improved health data transparency through health data bootcamps, a dozen code-a-thons, and 20 health data developer challenges and competitions held across the country. Talent and skills from across all aspects of business, government, and academia are emerging to put health data to work.

And what are the results? The unprecedented availability of free, easily accessible, and valuable data about health and health care represents an incentive for innovators developing businesses in technology and information services. Already, a wide array of innovative information tools and health care services are emerging. For example, HDI data resources are enabling the development of consumer smart phone applications that deliver personalized information about health issues and vital health services. These tools are also enabling powerful knowledge engines that provide user-specific information through personal electronic devices to support health practitioners and consumers as they make critical decisions about care. In essence, HDI has become a conceptual and technological centerpiece of an emerging health data ecosystem. Now, local, regional, and state governments are also taking major steps to make their health-related data more accessible, understandable, and usable.

Looking forward, we will continue to improve the breadth, depth, granularity, and timeliness of the data we are making available, guided by user feedback. We will enhance our collaboration and partnership with key stakeholders, and broaden efforts through the Health Data Consortium, a new public-private partnership to advance open health data and its use. We will increase our efforts to unlock the creative potential of data to improve health and health care for all Americans through greater knowledge and understanding. Learn more about our efforts in the weeks to come as we prepare for our celebration of health data at the Health Data Initiative Forum III – the Health Datapalooza.

Todd Park is Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services. On March 9, President Obama announced that he will be the next US Chief Technology Officer, based in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, starting March 16. In that role, he will continue his work with health IT and take on a number of new challenges aimed at harnessing technology for the American people.

Effective Aid Is Transparent and Accountable Aid

Rajiv Shah — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:03:53 +0000

For over five decades, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has saved lives and improved human welfare around the world. As a leader in global development, our Agency has amassed a wealth of knowledge that we believe is important to share publicly. By making our data, programs and evaluations easily accessible, we’re helping to create a global commons that grounds development practice in evidence and shares knowledge to inform significantly new approaches in development.

President Obama, Secretary Clinton and I take transparency and accountability in foreign aid seriously, and we’re working hard to ensure that we effectively communicate our efforts to the American people, our stakeholders and our partners at home and abroad.

As we celebrate Sunshine Week, here are just a few examples of USAID’s commitment to implementing the principles of transparency, participation and collaboration that were outlined in the Administration’s Open Government Initiative.

Foreign Assistance Dashboard: Working with the U.S. Department of State, we launched an easy-to-use dashboard that anyone in the world can use to track how American foreign aid dollars are spent. The dashboard doesn’t just apply to USAID. Soon, every U.S. Government agency that distributes foreign aid will be incorporated into the Dashboard.
Open Government Partnership: Last year, the President and Secretary Clinton launched the Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative that secures concrete commitments from countries around the world to promote transparency and fight corruption. The U.S. National Action Plan includes a commitment to making our foreign aid transparent and updating the information on a regular basis.

In one recent example of the power of open data and government, USAID launched the FWD campaign to raise awareness across America about the destructive combination of famine, war and drought that led to the recent food crisis in the Horn of Africa. Through interactive maps and tool kits, we are providing people with the latest information about the situation and giving them a powerful way to respond. The campaign represents our efforts across the Agency to strengthen open communication and partnership with a range of partners, including universities, companies and communities of faith.

International Aid Transparency Initiative: In November, Secretary Clinton and I travelled to the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, where she announced that the U.S. had become a signatory to the International Aid Transparency Initiative. This commits us to publish up-to-date data in a common format so that citizens of any country can better track the aid dollars that flow in and out of their countries.
Rigorous New Evaluation Policy: Through our ambitious set of reforms called USAID Forward, we have introduced a world-class evaluation policy that the American Evaluation Association called a model for the federal government. Under this policy, we are ensuring performance evaluations are completed for every major project and conducted by independent third parties.

By January 2013, we aim to complete 250 high quality evaluations. And we will release the results of all our evaluations within three months of their completion (see our current evaluation showcase).

USAID’s Annual Letter: On March 9, USAID released its second annual letter to directly communicate our Agency’s work with the millions of Americans who care about our mission—overcoming poverty, hunger, illness and injustice around the world. The letter also shares our thinking behind some of the strategic choices we have made to advance America’s key diplomatic and national security priorities. You can print and download a copy of the 2012 annual letter.
Freedom of Information Act: As part of our renewed commitment to the principles embodied by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), we implemented an aggressive strategy to process FOIA requests. In just the past fiscal year, we’ve reduced the Agency’s backlog from previous years by 51 percent—a rate that far surpasses the annual reduction goal of 10 percent.

As you can see, we’ve made tremendous progress in ensuring that our information, programs and results are easily accessible and transparent. By setting a high standard across the Agency, we can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our efforts, delivering meaningful results for the American people and the communities we serve.

Rajiv Shah is Administrator of USAID

Managing Government Records: The Backbone of Open Government

David S. Ferriero — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:30:15 +0000

As part of Sunshine Week, I want to take the opportunity to update you on one of the commitments made by the President as part of our Open Government Partnership National Action Plan. On November 28, 2011, President Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum entitled “Managing Government Records” to begin an Executive Branch-wide effort to reform records management policies and practices. This is the first time since the Truman Administration that this level of White House attention has been focused on the records of our country, and I am taking it very seriously.

As the President writes in the Memorandum, “Improving records management will improve performance and promote openness and accountability by better documenting agency actions and decisions.” He continues, “When records are well managed, agencies can use them to assess the impact of programs, to reduce redundant efforts, to save money, and to share knowledge within and across their organizations. In these ways, proper records management is the backbone of open Government.”

Effective records management goes hand-in-hand with the statutory requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and serves as the foundation for the broader Open Government goals articulated by the President on his first day in office—to make our service to the American people more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.

The National Archives is currently working with Federal agencies, public interest groups, professional organizations, vendors, and citizens, as well as our talented staff, to gather information on how to improve Government-wide records management.

If you are interested in participating in this information gathering effort, please join our IdeaScale community or attend our Public Meeting on the Memorandum on Tuesday, 27 March, at 10:00 a.m. at the William G. McGowan Theater in the National Archives building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC. You can follow this issue at our records management blog, Records Express.

Finally, in late July, the Director of OMB and I will issue a Records Management Directive that will instruct agency heads to take specific steps to reform and improve records management policies and practices within their agency. This is an historic moment in the history of our Government and we at the National Archives are proud to be playing a role in this effort.

David S. Ferriero is Archivist of the United States

Let the Sunshine In

Cass Sunstein, Chris Vein — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:52:20 +0000

This week is Sunshine Week, a joint project of the American Society of News Editors and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Held in mid-March, Sunshine Week is a national initiative to promote discussion about the importance of open government and freedom of information.

The theme of this year’s Sunshine Week is “Put Sunshine in Your Government,” and so now is an appropriate time to reflect on the Obama Administration’s strong commitment to open government over the past three years, and more particularly to provide an update on implementation of the U.S. National Action Plan on Open Government.

President Obama unveiled the National Plan in September 2011, as part of the United States’ commitment as a founding member of the Open Government Partnership – a global effort to promote more transparent, effective, and accountable governance in countries around the world.

A little over five months later, we have already made important progress on many initiatives and thus followed through on a number of commitments in the National Action Plan. To name a few:

Regulations.gov. To expand public participation in the development of regulations, Regulations.gov recently launched a major redesign, including innovative new search tools, social media connections, and better access to regulatory data. The result is a significantly improved website that will help members of the public to engage with agencies and ultimately to improve the content of rules.
Records Management. The backbone of a transparent and accountable government is strong records management. For this reason, the President signed and issued a presidential memorandum in November 2011 that directs agencies to improve their records management processes, especially with respect to digital records. OMB and NARA are currently working on a joint Records Management Directive to implement the President’s directions.
Smart Disclosure. The Administration is giving consumers access to key information to help them to make wiser choices. In many cases, smart disclosure enables people to track the nature and effects of their own past decisions, thus enabling them to make better choices in the future. In other cases, smart disclosure gives people easy access to their own records. For example, the White House’s new Green Button ensures that consumers have timely access to their own energy data, in consumer-friendly and computer-friendly formats; the relevant information has the potential to help consumers save a great deal of money. In addition, the Department of Veterans Affairs recently gave a boost to job-seekers by giving them access to their military records online, while IRS is developing an application to enable taxpayers to send securely a verified digital copy of prior year tax information to authorized third parties.
“We the People.” “We the People” is an online tool that allows Americans to petition the White House on a range of issues. Five months after its launch, we have seen strong participation from the public. More than 31,000 petitions have been created, 2.4 million petition signatures have been logged, 68 petitions have received an official response, and 28 more are in the works.
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Continuing the United States’ leadership in the global effort against corruption, and to ensure that American taxpayers are receiving every dollar due for the extraction of publicly owned resources, the Administration committed to joining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (“EITI”). In October, the White House announced that Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would be the Senior Administration official responsible for oversight of implementation of EITI. The Department of Interior is currently working with civil society and industry on implementation, and is encouraging public involvement on next steps.
Foreign Assistance. The Administration is working to institutionalize government-wide reporting requirements on foreign aid, directing agencies that administer such aid to provide more detailed information. Consistent with this push to increase USG transparency, and in support of the international aid transparency effort, Secretary Clinton recently announced that the United States would join the International Aid Transparency Initiative, publishing data in an open, up-to-date, and internationally compatible format.
Innovation. Through a centralized government platform, the United States built Data.gov to support an unprecedented amount of government data and applications. Working with others, we have deposited the first of several sets of open source code as we build a new version of Data.gov called the Open Government Platform, which will be available to all countries around the world. In addition, the United States is expanding the number of Data.gov “communities” on our domestic site that connect data related to particular subject matters with users and producers of that data. For example, education.data.gov was recently launched – serving as a central guide for education data resources, including applications for the classroom.
Freedom of Information Act. To continue to improve FOIA administration, modifications have been made to the GSA contract schedules, to afford agencies the ability to respond in a timely fashion. Moreover, the Office of Personnel Management just last week established a new job series, Government Information Management, 0306, encompassing work in the administration of FOIA and the Privacy Act, in order to elevate the importance of the work performed by those in the Federal Government who are responsible for realizing the President’s vision of an open and transparent government. To enhance the public’s ability to locate all the material that is being made available, DOJ recently added a search tool to FOIA.Gov that surveys information across government websites so that requesters can search and find information before making a FOIA request.

We have made significant progress on other initiatives as well, and as we implement these and other initiatives, the Administration will continue to work closely with the public and civil society organizations.

Our efforts are ongoing. Just last week, the White House launched ethics.gov, fulfilling a promise to create a centralized database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable, and downloadable format.

We are working hard to achieve our open government goals, every day, and we look forward to continuing to work together to make these goals a reality.

Cass Sunstein is the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Chris Vein is Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

An Open Innovation Toolbox

Chris Vein — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:08:57 +0000

The Obama Administration’s innovation agenda is aimed at finding, testing, and scaling new ideas that change the way government conducts business and delivers services through engagement with the American people. An innovative government incorporates an entrepreneurial mindset into its daily work – taking risks, building lean organizations, and developing innovative products and services faster than the rest of the world.

On his last day in office, then-U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra released the Open Innovator’s Practitioner’s Toolbox. It contains 20 of the best disruptive innovation practices conceived and built by entrepreneurs across government. They provide a rich set of guiding principles that any Federal, state, and local government can use to support rapid innovation supporting economic growth and job creation.

Rocket fuel for Innovation

A key component of open innovation is the identification and publication of machine-readable government data. By releasing such data, we can build new ways of understanding, using, and visualizing the delivery and impact of government functions.

These government data become the rocket fuel necessary for innovators to do what they do best – innovate. One example of the power of open data is the Community Health Data Initiative, which released a wealth of data on health care and determinants of health performance to the public, free of charge and without any intellectual property constraint, in an accessible, standardized, structured, downloadable format. Using these data, the Department of Health and Human Services built an insurance finder application that not only allows citizens to see what public- and private-sector insurance options are available in their area but also gives the public a better understanding of the quality of care that is delivered. Another example of this approach is Blue Button, a collaborative effort between the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services, which allows individuals to access and download information from their My HealtheVet personal health record into a simple text file or PDF that can be read, printed, or saved on any computer. It gives people complete control of this information to share with healthcare providers, caregivers, and other trusted individuals.

Role of Government as Impatient Convener

But the government does more than release data. Another way that the government helps innovators is to step back and allow the private sector to do what it does best – create jobs and opportunities for citizens. In this role, the government acts as an impatient convener – bringing together a range of experts to develop consensus-based standards that enable innovation. One such example is the Vets Job Bank. As part of the Administration’s commitment to improve access to employment opportunities for returning service members and veterans, the Vets Job Bank provides veterans with a central source for finding hundreds of thousands of private-sector openings. Government didn’t create the Bank, but it brought together the public- and private-sector leaders required to develop the rough consensus, code, and search capabilities that enable it to work.

Challenging Others to be Co-creators of Solutions

Enabled by the COMPETES Act, the use of challenges and prizes has become a valuable tool for involving entrepreneurs, innovators, and the curious public in solving some of the most vexing problems facing America. Oftentimes through only a small monetary incentive, the public and private sector taps into the Nation’s top talent, potentially leading to game-changing and innovative solutions to the challenging problems we face. One recent example is the Race to the Rooftop for Solar Power sponsored by the Department of Energy. Local and regional teams competed by identifying best practices to make installing solar energy cheaper and less cumbersome. At the end of the challenge, 22 of 46 applicants from 17 states were selected to share in $12 million of awards.

Leadership

Through the leadership of the President, Aneesh Chopra, and countless others, government has been opened to innovators and entrepreneurs who have implemented a new vision of what can be accomplished. The result is a dynamic network of public servants, private-sector leaders, and social entrepreneurs pooling their knowledge and resources to address our most pressing challenges. One approach has been to develop entrepreneurs-in-residence pilot projects at, for example, the Food and Drug Administration, where entrepreneurs from outside of government have been working with staff on a focused approach to design a new pathway for approval of medical devices.

Need Your Help

It is gratifying to look back at how far the Federal government has come in a few short years. The Federal government now embraces the contributions that innovators and entrepreneurs give to our country. The result is a dynamic network of public servants, private-sector leaders, and social entrepreneurs pooling their knowledge and resources to address our most pressing challenges. But to truly scale this approach, we need your help. Are you up to the challenge? We want to hear from you. Please send your ideas for how we can innovate even more to opengov@ostp.gov. And stay tuned for future blog posts, as we provide new opportunities for your participation and collaboration in this worldwide movement of open innovation.

Chris Vein is Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation

Unconferences, Hack-A-Thons, and a Code for Livability

Chris Vein — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:57:06 +0000

This past weekend saw three amazing open government events take place in both Washington, DC and New York City.

On Saturday, the Transportation Camp held its annual “unconference” in Washington, DC. An unconference is a more open version of a traditional conference, allowing participants the opportunity to help shape the structure and format of the day’s events. This year’s Transportation Camp, which was organized by OpenPlans, Mobility Lab, and Greater Greater Washington, hosted several hundred citizens, students, developers, businesses, and local and Federal government employees. Discussion focused on ways to engage citizens in decisions affecting transportation issues – including ways to better use bike shares open data. In addition, citizens and city officials brainstormed on ways to increase access to public transportation for all users, including those with limited mobility. And developers leveraged city and Federal datasets—ssome via the Federal platform Data.gov—inin addition to data provided by businesses like Capital Bike Share, to create platforms and services that help citizens make more informed decisions related to their commute.

Meanwhile in New York, CleanWeb Hack-a-thon developers, designers and business professionals worked to build applications that tackle energy, waste, water, and other sustainability issues by leveraging web and mobile technologies. Attendees built more than 15 applications over the weekend, many using data from the newly launched Green Button challenge.

Building on the theme of sustainability, the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, which includes the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the US Department of Transportation (DOT), and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), held the first Code for Livability in Washington, DC, on Sunday. The Partnership, with support from the White House Open Government Initiative and the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), convened web developers, the technology community, and a broad range of stakeholders representing housing, transportation, and the environment, to work on solutions that bring environmental sustainability to the forefront of peoples’ everyday lives.

This unique code-a-thon started with a lively discussion on the issues facing agencies that are working to create more sustainable communities. By generating the data to help planners build sustainable communities; enhancing existing sustainability applications with additional data; and building new sustainability applications that help individuals, businesses, and governments make more educated choices on livability, employment, and leisure, the day’s attendees collaborated with policymakers as never before on the issues that we all care about.

As the Administration’s Open Government movement moves into its third year, these events illustrate the potential for change when data are made transparent, citizens participate in turning those data into valuable tools, and public and private partners collaborate to scale innovative tools that they create nationwide.

Chris Vein is Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation

Celebrating Our Veterans With “Apps for Heroes”

Aneesh Chopra and Peter Levin — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:21:50 +0000

Last Wednesday, we joined Dr. Jill Biden at the Code for America headquarters, a non-profit startup that has attracted dozens of civic-minded software developers spending a year building new products and services – powered, in part, by open government data – to improve the lives of everyday Americans.

Dr. Biden celebrated the convening efforts of Code and 10 apps developed by the private sector to improve the employment prospects for our Nation’s heroes – from apps that help veterans build new skills or a professional network, to a personalized list of open job postings. We observed the results of LinkedIn’s “Veterans Hackday” – two of the 44 apps built over a weekend; a collaboration between two tech companies that had never worked together before – Jibe and KMS Software – to deliver an almost-paperless approach to qualify for eligible tax credits; and the impressive work of a veteran entrepreneur, Fidelis, focused on the military to civilian transition.

We saw these and other “Apps for Heroes” because Code for America made a commitment last August in response to the President’s call to action. We joined Code on this mission and engaged a broader voluntary collaborative of tech firms already active in the employment and training online market. They didn’t ask us for money. Rather, we brainstormed how government data, if released in a people-and-computer-friendly format, could serve as “rocket fuel” for their apps.

And then we went to work.

Inspired by President Obama’s Open Government Initiative and guided by the U.S. National Action Plan, we identified at least three areas where we might open up data that had previously been either in an inaccessible format, organized in a fragmented way, or largely unknown to the developer community:

Military Service Information: Veterans today collect a form – the DD-214 – that captures their military “resume”; while it can be electronically accessed, the data within the form is protected and in a form that isn’t accessible for a computer to read. Building on the momentum of VA’s initiative, Dr. Levin expanded their “Blue Button” service - which enables a veteran to safely and securely download their personal health data in computer-friendly form - to include a veteran’s service history, training, and credentials. Launched just in the beginning of December, over 60,000 veterans have already downloaded a “Blue Button” file that can be shared with the products and service as they see fit, like the apps for heroes we saw last week.
Military Skills Translator: The Department of Labor actively supports a non-profit, the O*Net center, to maintain a growing portfolio of tools and data sets that are freely available to developers or anyone for that matter. The problem was that very few of the developers we engaged over the past several months were even aware of this resource. When we showed them what we had they immediately went to work on “translating” military experience into skills that are relevant for their existing products and services.
Job Postings from Employers Seeking Veterans: President Obama launched the“Veterans Job Bank” last November, which provides access to hundreds of thousands of job postings from employers actively committed to hiring veterans. Built on an open standard, the “JobPosting” schema – endorsed by a coalition of search engines (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) through the schema.org community – empowers any employer to ensure its job postings are discoverable by the Job Bank. The big idea is that instead of requiring every employer to update a centralized database, we can dynamically “search” for veteran-committed jobs. Its faster, cheaper, and more reliable way to connect employers to talent. The Job Bank itself is accessible at the National Resource Directory and its search widget, built in an effort to support developers has offered an API that delivers search results straight to the app.

Finally, I thought to share the power of Open Innovation @ Internet speed. At a Summer Jobs + event last Tuesday, Twilio CEO, Jeff Lawson challenged the Twilio developer community to build an “App for Heroes.” In about an hour – from concept to go-live – developer Tony Webster built HeroJobs.org, a text messaging app that sends job alerts to veterans every morning based on their preferences, experience, and zip code.

We were humbled and honored that so many innovative firms volunteered their time and effort to incorporate these – and other open government data sets – as an important ingredient for their innovate employment or training support service. Our visit inspired us to push even harder to release government data, celebrate its use, and to engage our veterans directly to ensure they have the support they need in this important life transition.

Aneesh Chopra is U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Peter Levin is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Advisor to the Secretary, Department of Veterans Affairs

Seeking Your Input on the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan

Aneesh Chopra — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:14:46 +0000

On September 20, 2011, on the margins of the U.N. General Assembly, the President announced the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. The Plan was developed through a process that involved extensive consultations with external stakeholders, including a broad range of civil society groups and members of the private sector, to gather ideas on open government. As we continue our work to implement the National Action Plan, we want your help. Specifically, we’d like your input and recommendations on how to improve and help facilitate public participation – your participation – in government.

The United States committed to undertake 26 Open Government initiatives in the National Action Plan, and we are working to implement each of them now. For example, the White House recently announced that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will be the senior U.S. official to lead implementation of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, an effort to ensure that taxpayers receive every dollar due for extraction of our natural resources. A major milestone was also reached in the development of an open government platform that will enable governments around the world to stand up their own open government data sites. And just last week, the President fulfilled a commitment made in the National Action Plan to begin a government-wide effort to reform and modernize records management policies and practices.

We are now requesting your assistance with one of the initiatives in the U.S. National Action Plan designed to promote public participation:

Develop Best Practices and Metrics for Public Participation. We will identify best practices for public participation in government and suggest metrics that will allow agencies to assess progress toward the goal of becoming more participatory. This effort will highlight those agencies that have incorporated the most useful and robust forms of public participation in order to encourage other agencies to learn from their examples.”

Given the focus of this initiative, we thought it would be most appropriate to invite you to provide input and ideas on best practices and metrics for public participation, including but not limited to suggestions and recommendations that address the following questions:

What are the appropriate measures for tracking and evaluating participation efforts in agency Open Government Plans?
What should be the minimum standard of good participation?
How should participation activities be compared across agencies with different programs, amounts of regulatory activity, budgets, staff sizes, etc.?
What are the most effective forms of technology and web tools to encourage public participation, engage with the private sector/non-profit and academic communities, and provide the public with greater and more meaningful opportunities to influence agencies’ plans?
What are possible mechanisms for agencies to increase the level of diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds brought to bear in their activities and decisions?
What are the most effective strategies for ensuring that participation is well-informed?
What are some examples of success stories involving strong public participation, as well as less-than-successful efforts, and what lessons can be drawn from them?

Please send your thoughts to us at opengov@ostp.gov or use the web form provided, by January 3, 2012. We will consider your ideas and input as we continue to implement the U.S. National Action Plan and develop this best practices guidance on public participation.

Thank you.

Data.gov Goes Global

Steven VanRoekel, Aneesh Chopra — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:29:15 +0000

Last week, President Obama’s unprecedented efforts to advance open and transparent Government reached an important milestone. As part of a joint effort by the United States and India to build an open government platform, the U.S. team has deposited open source code– an important benchmark in developing the Open Government Platform that will enable governments around the world to stand up their own open government data sites.

Last week’s announcement is part of a broader effort to make government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. In September, the United States was one of eight founding governments of the Open Government Partnership,a new multilateral initiative that secures concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.The President also unveiled the U.S. National Action Plan on Open Government, which detailed steps the United States will take to help meet the initiative’s goals.

The plan specifically called for an effort under the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue to produce “Data.gov-in-a-Box” -- an open source version of the United States’ Data.gov data portal and India’s India.gov.in document portal. The U.S. and India are working together to produce an open source version available for implementation by countries globally, encouraging governments around the word to stand up open data sites that promote transparency, improve citizen engagement, and engage application developers in continuously improving these efforts. Technical teams from the U.S. and Indian governments have been working together since August of this year, with a planned launch of the open source product (which is now called the Open Government Platform (OGPL) to reflect its broad scope) in early 2012.

The module -- paired with the software for the Open Government Platform website being developed by India -- will enable governments around the world to launch their own open government sites and increase transparency and accountability. In the meantime, the U.S.-India team will continue to improve and integrate the modules of the Open Government Platform for the planned launch early next year.

Steven VanRoekel is the Federal Chief Information Officer

Aneesh Chopra is the Federal Chief Technology Officer

A Milestone for Expediting Air Traffic Modernization

Aneesh Chopra — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:44:56 +0000

Yesterday, the President’s Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients unveiled the Federal Infrastructure Projects Dashboard, an open government initiative that tracks the progress of high priority infrastructure projects as they are expedited through their regulatory review and permitting processes.

In October I highlighted the importance one of these projects, a Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, pilot project in Houston. NextGen is a comprehensive modernization of our Nation’s air traffic infrastructure, with the potential to save time and money for air travelers while delivering environmental benefits for communities on the ground.

On the new dashboard, you can find details about the efforts to redesign the airspace and flight paths in the Houston Metroplex. The project is poised to enter its detailed design phase, and thanks to the dashboard you can now follow its progress with information from the project leader who is accountable for getting it done.

The team has also included a summary explaining the benefits associated with completion of this project – including estimated annual fuel savings in the Houston airports alone of between 2.5 to 6.9 million gallons and carbon emissions reductions of 26,000 to 71,000 metric tons. And it will happen a full year ahead of schedule because of the Administration’s commitment to expediting reviews. But don’t just take my word on the benefits. See for yourself in a video that illustrates the savings that these new high efficiency air routes will deliver by using the power of GPS satellites and equipment that is already installed on airliners.

With benefits like these, scaling up the results from the Houston pilot project around the country will allow us to more rapidly attain NextGen’s enormous potential value for our Nation and economy. By embracing the power of open government, you can hold our feet to the fire in accelerating this important infrastructure project.

Aneesh Chopra is US Chief Technology Officer

By the Numbers: 475 Million

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 23:10:11 +0000

The National Archives and Record Administration has collected, on average, 475 million pages of records a year for each of the last 10 years. Thanks to new technology, both the volume and diversity of material being archived has increased, but Federal agencies aren't keeping up with this heavier load.

Making these records available and accessible to the public is an important step toward giving people clear and accurate information about the decisions and actions of the Federal Government. That, however, is largely dependent on taking advantage of these technology advances and making information available electronically, instead of relying on paper-based archives.

Today, President Obama signed a Presidential Memorandum that will do exactly that. His memorandum instructs Federal agencies move into a digital-based record keeping system, and which will save money, promote accountability, and increase government transparency.

Recommitting Ourselves to Making Government More Effective

Chris Vein and Remington Gregg — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:30:26 +0000

Last week, President Obama stood with other heads of state to endorse the principles of the Open Government Partnership and launch the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan.

We are proud of the work done so far to make our government more efficient and effective, and to illustrate the breadth of work done so far, many agencies posted blogs on their achievements of the last two and a half years. In particular, the Department of Transportation, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Department of the Treasury, Department of Commerce, Department of Agriculture, and General Services Administration are recommitting themselves to the principles of open government.

More still, agencies are doubling down and announcing new and innovative initiatives in addition to the commitments that are already in their Open Government Plans. For example, the Department of Justice plans to convene an Interagency Technology Working Group to focus on expanding the use of technology in the core elements of FOIA administration. And, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will establish an Innovation Lab that will benefit HUD through the incubation of novel and unique ideas that improve interactions with customers, increase mission efficiency and efficacy, and reduce duplication of effort.

Agencies continue to play a lead role in making our government more open. One initiative in our Plan commits to working to modernize the management of government records. To that end, the Archivist of the United States David Ferriero will convene a meeting of international archivists to discuss the role they play in a more open government. And, NASA will launch the International Space Apps Challenge to help improve public services and promote innovation through collaboration.

The Plan that we unveiled last week, and the initiatives that agencies are continuing to implement, are part of a larger effort to fulfill the President’s commitment to make our government more “open and competent.” In some ways, the hard work is just beginning, but we look forward to the work ahead.

Chris Vein is the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation

Remington Gregg is Advisor for Open Government

Open Government Action Plan for Innovators

Aneesh Chopra — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:13:58 +0000

On Tuesday, President Obama joined 40 Heads of State on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly to unveil the U.S. National Action Plan on Open Government, an ambitious effort to promote accountability, empower people with information they “can readily find and use”, and ensure public officials tap into the expertise and wisdom of the American people when setting policy.

Consistent with the goals of harnessing the creativity of the American people, a national plan for the United States has been designed in consultation with a wide range of civil society groups, academics, business leaders, and the general public. This plan will support our Nation’s job creators, especially in industries investing in productivity-enhancing digital infrastructure. In the healthcare sector alone, a recently published McKinsey study estimated a possible $1-300 billion annual productivity gain. Here are three highlights on how the national plan can catalyze innovation and entrepreneurship:

“Doubling Down” on Data.gov Communities: Over the past two years, the Administration has published an unprecedented amount of information in “computer-friendly” formats (over 390,000 data sets) freely available for developers without intellectual property constraint. To spur use, we’ve posted over 100 challenges, prizes or contests ranging from the First Lady’s “Apps for Healthy Kids” to the Vice President’s “Apps Against Abuse” – inviting students, hobbyists and professionals alike to demonstrate our capacity to solve the seemingly unsolvable through innovation.
- In 2011, we've worked to catalyze a growing movement of entrepreneurs and innovators harnessing open data to build sustainable new products or services through the launch of Data.gov “communities” in areas like health and energy. The plan calls on us to double the number of communities this year by expanding into education, R&D, and public safety. More importantly, we will focus like a hawk on connecting innovators to relevant data and unapologetically celebrate those products and services making a difference in the lives of everyday Americans.
“Smart Disclosure”: An important ingredient in driving productivity growth, especially in national priority areas like health, energy, and education, is the ability to measure outcomes. Since June 2010, the Administration has been promoting the use of disclosure as a low-cost, high-impact regulatory tool. For example, healthcare.gov provides access to health insurance market information that had previously been difficult to find – including denial rates and other relevant measures for an individual when searching for insurance options that best meet personal needs.
- To build on this work, the plan calls out recently issued guidance to Federal agencies on “smart disclosure”. While we are broadly supporting agencies and departments over the next year to ensure the timely release of complex information in standardized, machine-readable formats, we are particularly focused on catalyzing new products and services in areas that spur productivity growth – value-based payments in healthcare, higher education and energy use.
“Government as a Platform”: The infrastructure of the open data movement itself is evolving. While we are proud of the public reception to open government applications like data.gov, challenge.gov, the redesigned federalregister.gov and so forth, we are inspired by the limitless potential for governments within the U.S. and around the world to develop new and exciting tools that reflect openness as a core value in governance.
- To seed this movement, the plan calls on the Administration, in partnership with the Government of India, to release “Data.gov-in-a-Box” as an open source version of the United States’ Data.gov portal and India’s “India.gov.in” document portal. In the coming months, we will contribute the core set of applications that facilitate access to open government data, the mechanisms to extend such applications by any third party developer, and to inspire the public and private sector to engage in a “Race to the Top” to facilitate the use of open data in new products and services.

The U.S. National Action Plan includes plenty of other important initiatives to support the relationship between job creators and the government, including a commitment to publish guidelines on how to access scientific data produced through unclassified federal research funding, the ability to tap into their expertise on relevant public policy deliberations through an “ExpertNet” platform, and a global “Apps” competition drawing a global cadre of scientists and concerned citizens to harness open data to solve global challenges including weather impacts and the depletion of ocean resources.

We remain inspired by the growing number of open innovators and are confident this plan will accelerate this trend and increase the probability we invent our way out of some of the most pressing challenges that confront us.

Aneesh Chopra is US Chief Technology Officer

President Obama on Open Government: "The Essence of Democracy"

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:23:04 +0000

Download Video: mp4 (582MB) | mp3 (56MB)

This week, President Obama is in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly to meet with partners and address a range of issues with the international community, including open government.

At the U.N. General Assembly last year, President Obama called on nations to make, "specific commitments to promote transparency, to fight corruption, to energize civic engagement, and to leverage new technologies so we can strengthen the foundations of freedom in our own countries." Today, the President outlined the progress that has already been made in response to his call to action:

And now we see governments around the world meeting this challenge, including many represented here today. Countries from Mexico to Turkey to Liberia have passed laws guaranteeing citizens the right to information. From Chile to Kenya to the Philippines, civil society groups are giving citizens new tools to report corruption. From Tanzania to Indonesia -- and as I saw firsthand during my visit to India -- rural villages are organizing and making their voices heard, and getting the public services that they need. Governments from Brazil to South Africa are putting more information online, helping people hold public officials accountable for how they spend taxpayer dollars.

Here in the United States, we’ve worked to make government more open and responsive than ever before. We’ve been promoting greater disclosure of government information, empowering citizens with new ways to participate in their democracy. We are releasing more data in usable forms on health and safety and the environment, because information is power, and helping people make informed decisions and entrepreneurs turn data into new products, they create new jobs. We’re also soliciting the best ideas from our people in how to make government work better. And around the world, we’re standing up for freedom to access information, including a free and open Internet.

President Barack Obama participates in the Open Government Partnership event at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, N.Y., Sept. 20, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton)

The United States and seven other founding nations of the Open Government Partnership are delivering concrete open government plans to continue their commitment to make their governments more open, transparent, and accountable to their citizens. President Obama described initiatives from the U.S. Open Government Plan:

Among our commitments, we’re launching a new online tool -- called “We the People” -- to allow Americans to directly petition the White House, and we’ll share that technology so any government in the world can enable its citizens to do the same. We’ve develop new tools -- called “smart disclosures” -- so that the data we make public can help people make health care choices, help small businesses innovate, and help scientists achieve new breakthroughs.

We’ll work to reform and expand protections for whistleblowers who expose government waste, fraud and abuse. And we’re continuing our leadership of the global effort against corruption, by building on legislation that now requires oil, gas, and mining companies to disclose the payments that foreign governments demand of them.

Today, I can announce that the United States will join the global initiative in which these industries, governments and civil society, all work together for greater transparency so that taxpayers receive every dollar they’re due from the extraction of natural resources.

The President also looked forward to how the international open government initiative will expand in the future:

And today is just the beginning of a partnership that will only grow -- as Secretary Clinton leads our effort on behalf of the United States, as these nearly 40 nations develop their own commitments, as we share and learn from each other and build the next generation of tools to empower our citizens and serve them better.

So that’s the purpose of open government. And I believe that’s the essence of democracy. That’s the commitment to which we’re committing ourselves here today.

The United States Releases its Open Government National Action Plan

Aneesh Chopra and Cass Sunstein — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:30:00 +0000

“In all parts of the world, we see the promise of innovation to make government more open and accountable. And now, we must build on that progress. And when we gather back here next year, we should bring specific commitments to promote transparency; to fight corruption; to energize civic engagement; to leverage new technologies so that we strengthen the foundations of freedom in our own countries, while living up to the ideals that can light the world.”

--President Barack Obama, September 23, 2010

On September 23, 2010, President Obama challenged the members of the United Nations General Assembly to work together to make all governments more open and accountable to their people. To meet that challenge, in July 2011, the United States and Brazil announced the creation of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) – a global initiative that supports efforts to promote more transparent, effective, and accountable institutions globally. The OGP effort builds directly on steps President Obama has taken since the first full day of his Administration to strengthen democracy and promote a more efficient and effective government through greater openness.

And today, as part the OGP effort, the U.S. and other members of the OGP Steering Committee are coming together in New York to welcome new members to the partnership and to unveil Open Government National Action Plans. As we developed a U.S. National Action Plan (“National Plan”), the Federal Government engaged in extensive consultations with external stakeholders, including a broad range of civil society groups and members of the private sector. We solicited input from the Administration’s own Open Government Working Group, comprised of senior-level representatives from executive branch departments and agencies. White House policymakers also engaged the public via a series of blog posts, requesting ideas about how to focus Open Government efforts on increasing public integrity, more effectively managing public resources, and improving public services.

Among the highlights of the Plan:

“We the People.” The White House announced the launch of the “We the People” petition platform to give Americans a direct line to voice their concerns to the Administration via online petitions. In addition, the Administration plans to publish the source code of the new “We the People” petition platform so that it is available to any government around the world that seeks to solicit and respond to the concerns of the public.
Whistleblower Protection. Recently, Congress nearly enacted whistleblower legislation that would eliminate loopholes in existing protections, provide protections for employees in the intelligence community, and create pilot programs to explore potential structural reforms in the remedial process. The Administration will continue to work with Congress to enact this legislation. But if Congress remains deadlocked, the Administration will explore options for utilizing executive branch authority to strengthen and expand whistleblower protections.
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. The U.S. is committing to implementing the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). EITI requires governments to publicly disclose their revenues from oil, gas, and mining assets, and for companies to make parallel disclosures regarding payments. By signing onto the global standard that EITI sets, the U.S. Government can help ensure that American taxpayers are receiving every dollar due for the extraction of these valuable public resources.

Other initiatives include: expanding the use of technology to achieve greater efficiencies in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) administration; overhaul the public participation interface on regulations.gov to help the public find, follow, and participate in Federal rulemakings; and launching ExpertNet, a platform to communicate with citizens who have expertise on a pertinent topic. There are a lot of exciting initiatives in our Plan – too many to recount in this post – but you can view the full plan here .

At the President’s State of the Union Address in January 2011, he said that the American people deserve a government that is “open and competent.” Building on the efforts inaugurated by the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, and the President’s continued leadership, we look forward to the work ahead.

Watch the video "U.S. Release Open Government Action Plan" here.