CRS Conducts Assessment of Open Government Initiative
The Congressional Research Service recently released a new study on the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative, which is committed to making the federal government more transparent, participatory and collaborative. The CRS report adds to assessments that have already been conducted by OMB and OpentheGovernment.org.
Overall, the CRS report doesn’t add a tremendous amount of analysis to the conversation about open government, as most of the report is dedicated to outlining what has taken place over the past two years.
In general, the report seems to take a rather skeptical tone about open government. It doesn’t come out against the work that has taken place or openly criticize it, but repeatedly offers reasons why Congress may not wish to support greater steps in this direction or might want to go farther (I don’t read many CRS reports, so that may just be how all reports are written.)
A few conclusions from the report stood out for me:
- A few times in the report, CRS notes that the quality of Open Government Plans varied widely. It faults the Open Government Directly for not providing enough explicit guidance about how agencies should implement open government, nor does it provide explicit consequences for failing to live up standards of open government. I heartily agree, especially with regard to public participation and collaboration.
- The reports suggests that most of the data that is being made available by agencies is useful to the public, but does not necessarily improve accountability. According to the report: “Releasing these types of datasets or making previously available datasets easier to find and use may be better characterized as increasing data accessibility and not as increasing government transparency.”
- The report suggests that Congress may wish to consider which elements of open government should be affirmed through legislation and what additional provisions and directions could be pursued if it did so. It would be fantastic for Congress to take up this conversation.
In the future, I hope that CRS, GAO or other public bodies will delve more deeply into the Open Government Initiative and really analyze the participatory activities that have been undertaken by agencies. I’d love to see more about what agencies are doing to engage the public and what value that is bringing to the federal government.
It would be great to see a more explicit call for the Open Government Initiative to issue clearer definitions and standards for what good participation and collaboration should look like — so that we can judge against those standards.
