Since his inauguration, President Obama has emphasized interfaith cooperation and community service – as an important way to build understanding between different communities and contribute to the common good.

On a conference call this afternoon, Joshua DuBois, Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and Patrick Corvington, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, launched the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge.  The launch featured a video from President Obama calling on institutions of higher education to make a commitment to advancing interfaith and community service initiatives over the course of the 2011-2012 academic year.

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.

The mission of the Department of Veterans Affairs – enshrined in our building – is “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan.”  For our men and women in uniform who have fought for our country – serving them is a privilege and responsibility we take very seriously.  At the VA, we are committed to continuing to meet and surpass our highest standards of care for each and every veteran, each and every day. Open government helps us do this: the publication of key health-related data to increase transparency, the creation of technological tools helping veterans to participate, and the harnessing of new ideas for innovation and collaboration, all fuel our mission.

During Sunshine Week we are reflecting on our accomplishments – not so we can rest, but so we can take inspiration to build on our successes. We’re on a deliberate and thoughtful path to become an even more people-centric, results-driven, and forward-looking organization. I invite you to visit http://www.va.gov/open/ to see for yourself.  Here is a sample of important steps we have taken:

Today, we launched a new section on WhiteHouse.gov that is dedicated to good government. WhiteHouse.gov/GoodGovernment is your central portal to tools and data that connect citizens to their government and improve their everyday lives, as well as Presidential Actions that promote open, transparent and accountable government. 

You'll find useful tools and data from across the administration all in one place. Here, you can: 

• Browse the names of everyone who visits the White House: Having released over 1,000,000 names to date, the White House provides records of visitors on an ongoing basis online.
• Report suspected incidents of improper spending: PaymentAccuracy.gov gives taxpayers a way to join the fight against improper spending by reporting suspected incidents of fraud, waste, and abuse.
• See what’s on the President’s and Vice President’s calendar: Check out the President’s and Vice President’s daily public schedules, subscribe to updates, and even add their events to your own calendar.
• Review each agency’s Open Government Plan: Following the President’s Open Government Directive, agencies implemented ambitious Open Government Plans, utilizing new technologies to connect citizens to their government.

You can also review Presidential Actions that call for more open and accountable government:

• Shutting the "Revolving Door": President Obama has taken historic steps to close the "revolving door" that carries special interest influence in and out of the government.
• Mandating Federal Agencies Disclose Data: A Presidential Memorandum mandates an Open Government Directive directing specific actions to achieve transparency, openness, and engagement.
• Making the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) put citizens first: The President’s Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act directs that it be administered with a presumption of disclosure, not one of non-disclosure.
• Making classification a two-way street: For the first time, no records may remain classified indefinitely. An executive order on Classified National Security Information makes major changes to address the problem of over-classification and public access to formerly classified records.

Sunshine Week, the national initiative that focuses on transparency and open government, is a particularly apt time to unveil a site that highlights successes from across the executive branch. The administration's efforts to promote open and accountable government are on-going. Moving forward, the good government site will be a useful resource to everyone interested in how, and how far, the administration is changing the way Washington works and improving citizens' everyday lives.

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.

For too long, the Federal Government has failed to effectively harness the power and potential of information technology (IT)  -- despite spending approximately $80 billion dollars on IT each year, and more than $600 billion over the past decade.  As a result, it has lagged far behind the private sector in the reaping the gains in productivity and enhancements in service from IT.  To get a better return on this investment for the American people, we have fundamentally altered the way we manage the federal government's IT projects -- using transparency to shed light on government operations and to hold government managers accountable for results.

On my first day on the job, at the beginning of the Obama Administration, I was handed a portfolio that included $27 Billion in IT projects that were years behind schedule, and over budget. I quickly found that the sheer size of the portfolio often led to a sense of faceless accountability and quickly set out to fix that. That’s why just months after President Obama took office, we launched the IT Dashboard (June, 2009) – which provides a clear window into Federal IT projects, bolstering transparency and accountability.  The IT Dashboard shines a light on these projects, including if they are on schedule and within budget -- and posting the photo and name of the official responsible -- and agencies continue to increase transparency and improve data quality.

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.

Few things are as deeply personal as your health or the health of your loved ones, and few decisions deserve as much attention as those we make in our daily lives to protect our health.  At HHS, our efforts to make government more open have provided many Americans with health information they can use to be well and realize their potential.  We aim to help make our government better, faster, and smarter.

While we have important work yet to be done, Sunshine Week provides an occasion to take stock of the many important projects into which many of our nearly 80,000 employees – working with many of you – have poured their energy and talents over the past year.  I invite you to visit our Open Government website, where we warmly welcome your feedback, ideas, and contributions.

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

Federal agencies collect enormous amounts of data about such diverse matters as automobile safety, air travel, air quality, workplace safety, drug safety, nutrition, crime, obesity, the employment market, and health care.  The Obama Administration has made it a priority to share this and other government information – what the President has called a “national asset” – to improve citizen education and decision-making, and to spur innovation and job creation.  

Federal agencies are working hard to foster open government, and we encourage you to examine what they have done. For example:

• The Department of Homeland Security created “Virtual USA,” enabling public safety officials across all levels of government to share information in real time, and improve response to national disasters. 
• The Department of Energy, as part of its efforts to promote clean energy, launched OpenEI.org, containing dozens of clean energy resources and data sets, including maps of worldwide solar and wind potential, information on climate zones, and energy best practices.  The Department intends to expand these resources to include on-line training and technical expert networks.
• The Environmental Protection Agency, together with other federal, state, local, and tribal agencies, developed AIRNow.gov, offering the public daily Air Quality Index forecasts and real-time Air Quality Index conditions for over 300 cities across the country as well as links to detailed state and local air quality cites.
• And six federal agencies—the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the EPA—created Recalls.gov, to alert the public to unsafe, hazardous, or defective products and up-to-date consumer safety information.

Throughout the week, WhiteHouse.gov will continue highlighting the Administration’s commitment to open government, including the accomplishments other departments, including Health and Human Services and Transportation.  We hope you will take a moment to read these blog posts.  What unites these federal agencies is that they all consider open government to be a long-term investment in building a stronger democracy and creating a more efficient and effective government. 

This week is “Sunshine Week.”  Led by the American Society of News Editors and originally funded by the Knight Foundation, Sunshine Week is observed by media organizations around the country. It coincides with National Freedom of Information Day—March 16—selected to fall on James Madison’s birthday.  Journalists, good-government groups, transparency advocates, educators, and many others interested in government transparency host events throughout the week to promote open government and freedom of information. They do so to assess the extent to which government is truly open, and to encourage citizens to seek information from their government and participate in public affairs. 

Sunshine Week provides an ideal time to recount the Administration’s many open government successes since last March.  And so each day this week, we will identify various ways in which agencies have made our government more open and, in turn, more democratic and more efficient. On Monday, the Department of Justice launched FOIA.gov, and we reviewed some of the substantial progress agencies across the government have made to disclose more and withhold less. We will recount, among other things, how greater transparency has saved government resources, and how technology and openness have been fused in ways that improve the everyday lives of our citizens.  We will also feature the enormous work many agencies have done over the past year to make government more open and foster public participation.  As the examples are too numerous to catalogue here, I encourage you to visit agencies’ own Open Government websites, which feature their recent successes.

President Barack Obama talks with the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search finalists in the East Room of the White House, March 15, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Keeping his commitment to honor remarkable science and math scholars just like sports champions, President Obama today welcomed 40 high school finalists of the Intel Science Talent Search to the White House.

The President congratulated the students for embodying what is needed to out-educate our global competitors, adding that as the next generation of scientists, engineers, and technological leaders, their success is crucial for America to win the future.  The students also stand out as role models for the benefits of high-quality science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, education in the United States, a key priority for the President.

Today, the Administration issued 20 legislative recommendations to Congress, designed to improve intellectual property enforcement.  These legislative recommendations exemplify the Administration’s commitment to protect and grow jobs and exports, as well as to safeguard the health and safety of our people.

The theft of American innovation costs jobs and imperils economic growth.  This must end.  We have recommended legislative changes that will help us ensure that American workers and businesses are protected.  Among those changes, we are seeking significantly increased criminal penalties for those selling counterfeits to our military, when counterfeiting and piracy is funding organized criminal activity, for those selling products that can harm or kill American consumers and for those stealing American innovation and transferring it overseas.  We are also seeking changes to ensure that our laws can address technological changes, such as illegal streaming, and that law enforcement can share information effectively with businesses.