Department of Defense
Open Government One Year Assessment
April 7, 2011
In December 2009, the Director of OMB called on all Executive Branch agencies to become more open and accountable in accordance with the President’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. In the past year, DoD has taken specific actions to implement the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration:
- Creation of the Open Government Web page: In February 2010, the Department launched its Open Government Web page at http://www.defense.gov/open to serve as the gateway for DoD activities related to the Open Government Initiative.
- Publication of high value datasets on Data.gov: DoD published a total of 252 datasets and tools achieving over 5,800 weekly downloads.
- The Department contributed 55 of the initial 94 datasets included as part of the launch of the Law Data Community, providing ready access to thousands of DoD legal decisions dating back to 1996.
- For the first time ever, DoD released geographic information for major installations, ranges, and training areas in the United States and its territories. Homeland Security/Homeland Defense, law enforcement, and readiness planners will benefit from immediate access to authoritative DoD site location data during emergencies.
- Publication of the Open Government Plan: Initially released in April and updated in June 2010, the Plan is the Department’s strategic roadmap for increasing transparency, participation and collaboration.
- The Department is committed to reviewing suggestions and comments posted about our Plan and we are acting on several of the most promising ideas to improve the next release in 2011.
- Freedom of Information Act releases: DoD had a Department-wide FOIA backlog reduction of 31% in FY 2010, far exceeding the Open Government Directive goal of 10%. Specific statistics are available in the FY 2010 annual FOIA report posted on our website.
- Beginning in April 2010, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff began posting all non-privacy FOIA responses online. This has resulted in tens of thousands of pages of proactive releases being made available to the public with more being added every month.
- DoD is moving towards having the individual, decentralized FOIA centers beginning to post proactively, just as the OSD/JS element has done. The Department is also investigating providing better searchability of all the materials that are being posted to allow interested parties to leverage them more fully.
- Public participation: DoD has embraced the use of Challenge.gov to engage the public for innovative solutions to problems faced by the Department every day.
- To date, DoD components have posted 13 of the 79 challenges on Challenge.gov, offering over $1.22M in prizes and attracting over 730 supporters. The Department will continue to use this tool to increase public participation in the future.
- Employee participation: In August, the Secretary of Defense launched an online contest to directly solicit and reward creative ideas from DoD military and civilian employees for how to reduce overhead costs and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the Department.
- Over the course of six weeks, the Department received almost 16,000 ideas from DoD employees around the world. Many are currently being evaluated for implementation.
- Flagship initiative: DoD successfully launched two Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record pilots in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs. These pilots establish the infrastructure and interoperability necessary in order to share data at unprecedented levels and improve healthcare delivery to service members, veterans and their families.
- In September, DoD Military Treatment Facility, VA Medical Center, and private sector providers in the Tidewater, Virginia area began successfully exchanging live patient data including clinical data and hematology laboratory results.
- In March, the Spokane, Washington pilot went live, building upon Tidewater capabilities to exchange an expanded set of data with new regional partners. Planning for an additional pilot in the Puget Sound, Washington area is currently underway.
Through the above actions over the past year, the Department of Defense has demonstrated its commitment to improve transparency, participation and collaboration. The Department looks forward to strengthening the pillars of Open Government in the years to come.