Transparency Overhead

The federal government's Open Government Initiative is actually moving along, which surprises me. A lot of people who have tried to get government information know the runaround: endless phone calls, letters, and emails if you're lucky. At last, the threat of a FOIA request was usually enough to shake a document loose months later. Some agencies have been proactive in publishing their plan to meet the initiative, and a few are behind. The Sunlight Labs Open Watcher page at http://sunlightlabs.com/open/ is an easy way to track some of the bigger departments and how well they have complied with OMB's directive. As you can see, most of the departments on the list haven't published three high-value datasets or created the "Open" page on their department website. For those departments in compliance, I have a followup question: what do you have besides datasets?

There are millions of pages of documents that do not exist in electronic format in the federal government, and the Open Government Initiative needs to address them. I was at a government trade show this week, and one of the attendees explained how her agency was trying to get college kids to sit in a room and scan paper all summer. That doesn't sound like a serious commitment to me; it sounds like a recipe for failure. As outlined in the OMB document, departments and independent agencies must first identify documents with high value to the public. Next comes the conversion, which can be handled many ways. My recommendation is to find a contractor who can take those documents away, scan and OCR them, then destroy the documents if appropriate. Specialists with high-speed scanners can do ten times the work and cost less compared to a 19-year-old with an old hand-feed scanner, and specialists have their own office offsite. In addition, a professional document management company can provide quality assurance and help with taxonomy.

There are other good reasons to scan. Agencies have whole rooms full of old paper, creating wasteful spending on real estate plus a fire hazard and a huge information risk to manage. In addition, with many civilian baby boomers leaving government over the next few years, no one will know what's in those file cabinets anymore. The paper may as well be blank when those boomers retire.

Will the Open Government Initiative help people understand and participate in the federal government better? Information is not knowledge, but you can't gain knowledge without it. It should be easier to find waste and ineffective programs, and the press can help spotlight problem areas.

How committed is the government to this? The biggest indicator will be what happens when some of these agencies don't meet the deadline. It's coming up very soon, and there should be consequences for failure. Watch this blog for an update.

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