With about a week to go before their first deadline, the Obama administration is saying that the Open Government Directive, the keystone effort to increase online access to government data, is on schedule.
In a public webcast on Thursday morning, Aneesh Chopra, the administration’s chief technology officer, said that officials were meeting weekly to keep progress on track. He promised that “each of our key agencies will release what we call high value data sets” in time to meet the directive’s first (and impending) January 22 deadline, which requires each agency to identify and publish in three such data sets online in an open format.
“We are meeting, we are talking, we are trading ideas. No significant delays are expected at the present time,” said Norm Eisen, the administration’s special counsel for ethics and government reform, in response to a question from Ellen Scott of ExecutiveGov during a conference call with reporters earlier this week. “We’re working to hit our marks.”
The Sunlight Foundation (which supports CJR’s reporting on transparency issues) has a handy timeline of the administration’s self-set deadlines under the Open Government Directive, which in addition to next Friday’s data set release, requires every agency to launch an open government website and for the White House to set up a progress monitoring public dashboard site by February 6.
The Open Government Directive will be the topic of a panel (featuring yours truly) at this coming Wednesday’s “Transparency in the Obama Administration” conference, a one-year-in assessment hosted by the Collaboration on Government Secrecy at American University’s Washington College of Law. (PDF schedule here.) The conference will be webcast, and starts at 9:15 a.m. with a keynote by Beth Simone Noveck, the director of the White House’s Open Government Initiative.

What?
No mention of Scott Ritter, former Nation contributer and Bush hater http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070205/ritter
being arrested for pedophilia AGAIN!
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-us-weapons-inspector-charges,0,2652893.story
C'mon CJR, no conflict of interest? Yeah, right.
#1 Posted by JSF, CJR on Thu 14 Jan 2010 at 05:07 PM
More Conflict of interest?
Why no mention of Carole Anne Burger, Huffington Post contributer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-anne-burger
murdered her spouse and their is no mention in CJR about it? Hmmm......
ttp://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2008/10/29/1029bbdeaths.html
Why not tie Victor Navasky, CJR, the Nation, Scott Ritter and Carole Ann Burger as a campaign theme this election year? After all, they all cover for each other.
#2 Posted by JSF, CJR on Thu 14 Jan 2010 at 05:33 PM