UPDATE: White House answered my question! Follow-up coming.
The White House's top data chieftains are unveiling the administration's Open Government Directive, which promises to increase transparency in government at the federal level, opening up agencies to rely on the public to inform how they deal with data.
In theory this is a huge step forward for democracy 2.0. You can participate in the live stream by asking questions via Facebook.
What this initiative also includes is a series of directives for agencies to further develop their offerings of data.
Watching the stream itself is quite revolutionary for anyone in Chicago who has watched the city council stream it's proceedings. Those are only available while the city council is in session and while a live transcript is available, you can't copy it and paste it for later use in say, a blog post or story.
The document is available here and I'll be poring over it in the next few days. If the the largest bureaucracy on the planet can tell it's children how to behave when it comes to data, it's a fair question for the mayor to put the city on the same level. And don't gripe about resources or technology.
We have an army of hackers, geeks and better government folks who have been chomping at the bit for way to long to not extend some capabilities here.
What do you think? Obviously there are issues of privacy and homeland security, but for the bulk of information requests that are routinely denied I think this is a great step in the right direction.
Filed under: 2.0, Politics, Transparency
Tags: Barack Open, open government, transparency, White House
