The project was launched with an audit of the Open
Government Plans agencies were required to develop by April 7, 2010, under the Open
Government Directive (OGD). When the initial results were released, the OpenTheGovernment.org
coalition announced the contributors would re-evaluate any plans updated by
June 2010. The contributors also are working with a consortium of academic
institutions and others to develop a metric to evaluate if agencies are making
real progress in openness, participation, and collaboration.
Elements of the OGD require agencies to provide the public
with information about how the agency currently handles and maintains information,
and a roadmap for how and when the agency will make itself more transparent,
participatory, and collaborative. The level of detail required by the OGD can
be used to hold federal agencies accountable. Many of the federal agencies
have approached implementation of the OGD requirements with energy and
enthusiasm. If implemented with spirit, vigor, and innovation, the Open
Government Plans can serve as a vehicle for fundamentally changing the way the
federal government interacts with the public. This, in turn, may prove to
be a catalyst for shifting public trust in government.
Most of the agencies that produced substantive Open
Government Plans have made significant improvements to their plans since their
initial release. The wide variation in strength among the plans required under
the OGD revealed by our initial audit is noticeably less dramatic; many plans
that did not meet the minimal requirements have addressed these weaknesses by,
for example, providing more specificity on deadlines and identifying where
certain items mentioned in the plans can be found. The updated audit results
also reveal several agencies are going beyond the minimal requirements of the
OGD.
The updated audit results also include agencies that were
not required by the OGD to develop open government plans, but did. Evaluators
awarded these agencies for going beyond the call of duty by giving them three
bonus points. Evaluators also provided each “extra” agency with informal
feedback on the plan in May; almost half of the extra agencies responded to the
feedback by updating and strengthening their plans by June 2010.
For detailed results of the updated review, click here. For results of the initial
audit, click here. For individual agency
evaluations, including updates, use the navigation bar on the left side of the
site.
Going Forward
Even when all agencies meet the minimal requirements identified
in the OGD for the Open Government Plans, more needs to be done to improve
openness in government. First and
foremost, the public must be assured that they can obtain certain information
consistently across government, regardless of which agency website they
visit. The outside government openness
community is putting the final touches on a process for describing minimal
elements that should be part of an open government
floor. We have shared versions of
this floor with the Obama administration and agency officials, and hope that it
or something similar becomes the standard that is adopted by all federal
agencies.
As previously stated,
contributors to this project are in the early stages of developing metrics to
evaluate implementation of open government. The evaluation will include agency
progress against its Open Government Plan, availability of items from the open
government floor, and other measures of openness, participation, and
collaboration. The work is being led by faculty from the Armstrong Institute
for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University of Ohio and the Center for
Library and Information Innovation at the University of Maryland. We welcome
participation from any additional institutions of higher learning committed to
working in an open research format, and also will release drafts of the
evaluation framework for public comment.