I have been dying to use that headline forever, and the Open Government Directive push has made my dream come true. Anyway, one of the "Cabinet commitments" that the White House is highlighting as part of round one of the initiative's launch is a release from the General Services Administration of more than 11,000 FACA records, now live on Data.gov.

FACA, you may or may not know, is the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Passed way back in 1972, the bill's aims were admirable: to impose some order on the hundreds of ad hoc committees, roundtables, and informal advisory groups that were whispering in the ears of public officials. FACA is often talked about as cutting down on the locker-room chatter that shaped public policy at that point. The public, the thinking goes, should know the names, affiliations, and complicating ties of anyone who is shaping the laws and edicts of the land.

Baked into FACA from the get-go was a requirement that a database of standing federal advisory committees be made public. And it has long been, including in the recent era on the General Services Administration website. You wouldn't describe the GSA FACA system as user-friendly, and the new bulk data dump on Data.gov (425 MB, in Microsoft Access format, covering the time period 1997-2008) isn't warm and cuddly either. But that information can now be used to map out just who's serving on the 1,000 or so current FACA-governed advisory committees. We can have a better image of just who is advising government. All that's needed: a mapper, or several.

In fact, some in the White House are practically begging for someone to use this data dump to shine some light on the people behind the people within government:

[F]or the first time, the General Services Administration will make 12 years of Committee data available for free download on Data.gov, enabling the public to scrutinize a rich universe of information, including 11,430 individual committee records detailing $3.24 billion in related spending for 77,740 meetings and 11,317 reports. The data can now be “mashed up” to generate insight into the range of individuals and interests advising government.

On second thought, this post probably should have been titled "Map the FACA." (Photo credit: wohlford)