"Open" Pages by Agency:

• Agency for International Development
• Department of Agriculture
• Department of Energy
• Department of Education
• Department of Commerce
• Department of Defense
• Department of Health and Human Services
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Department of Interior
• Department of Justice
• Department of Labor
• Department of State
• Department of Transportation
• Department of Treasury
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Environmental Protection Agency
• General Services Administration
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• National Science Foundation
• Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Office of Personnel Management
• Small Business Administration
• Social Security Administration

Saturday was the deadline for federal agencies to get web pages up and running at [agency].gov/open, as per the President's orders in his Open Government Directive issued 60 days previous. And despite the snowpocalypsemageddon and DC's own special way of dealing with weather (panic!), all twenty federal agencies covered by the order managed to get something up before time ran out. (Check the list to the right to see how each agency went about setting up their "open" page.)

Beyond that, there's, frankly, not a tremendous amount to report. The requirement of the OGD on the web page front weren't hugely demanding. In addition to a page in place, all the agencies were really directed to do was to get "incorporate a mechanism for the public to...give feedback on and assessment of" how the departments were doing on the open government front. As Sunlight's John Wonderlich notes, many of the departments chose to simply plug in the GSA-approved IdeaScale tool for collecting and collaboratively vetting that feedback. [Update: Here's what GSA is telling agencies about IdeaScale that has so many of them using it.] Generally speaking, the open gov pages put up by agencies to meet Saturday's deadline are an act of digital flag-planting, functioning as placeholders for more in-depth open government work to come.

The White House had its own homework assignment due this weekend: developing an open government dashboard to track whether and how well the dozens of agencies under its purview are fulfilling what the OGD expects from them. That's up at WhiteHouse.gov/Open/Around. The barebones matrix color-codes the agencies on whether they're providing high-quality data to Data.gov and whether they've got their "Open" home pages up and running. The big, empty box still left to be color-coded? Whether the agencies have drafted comprehensive and meaningful plans to open up their processes in powerful ways. Those plans are due in about two months.

Rollin' rollin' rollin', keep them data rollin': A herd of federal agency data was taken in from the pasture on Jan. 22. // Photo: Bureau of Land Management

Not to knock the plight of the wild North American horse, but it isn't clear to me how population counts of wild burros and mustangs are the most important data the Department of the Interior has to offer for its eager public.

Along with every other federal agency, Interior had until Jan. 22 to respond to a Dec. 8 directive from Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag by posting, on the Obama administration's Data.gov open government data repository, three "high-value data sets." Their response was a list of volunteer opportunities from serve.gov; a list of government recreation facilities; three data sets concerning wildland fires; and an elaboration on the United States' dwindling stock of wild mustangs.

So I asked Interior: What makes the wild American donkey so important?

If there's one thing that is coming to be a hallmark of the Obama approach to managing government, it may well be this: dashboards. A favorite of the modern business world, computer-based dashboards aim to give executives a glimpse at whether his or her organization's constituent parts are working together to form a smooth-running machine. As quickly as your speedometer or gas gauge tells you what you need to know about your car, a management dashboard is meant to inform the boss about organizational performance.

But when it comes to the U.S. Open Government Dashboard currently in the works at the White House, the "boss" is meant to be you -- an interested public and outside watchdog groups.

Fourteen different federal agencies and departments, from the will have their performances tracked when the open government dashboard goes live, scheduled under the terms of the terms of the President's recently-released Open Government Directive to happen no later than February 6th of 2010. And the White House is looking for helping figuring out just what the dashboard should track. "We need to enlist your help holding 'our feet to the fire,'" blogged Beth Noveck, Deputy U.S. CTO for Open Government. "We are looking for your input about what metrics the Dashboard should measure." The White House is taking comments through the Office of Science and Technology Policy's WordPress blog...

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)

With a degree of coordination more associated with a teenage gymnasts than the United States federal government, in the short time since the Obama White House issued its call for a more open government on Tuesday morning, 17 of the biggest federal agencies have out memos or press releases touting what will be in their custom open government plans. NASA is pledging to publish an RSS feed of tech projects available for public licensing. USDA is releasing new data in the hopes of spurring software developers to enrich its stable of food-related web resources and games, which already boasts MyFoodapedia and the MyPyramid Blast Off experience. You can check out all of the agency open gov proposals here.

The Sunlight Foundation is offering advice to all you federal new media directors out there on how to comply with the new Open Government Directive from the White House.* Prefer a little one-on-one guidance? Starting December 21st, they'll be having a series of open office hours so that you can come by their south Dupont Office office and hash things out in person.

*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.

Sure, U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, and White House new media director Macon Phillips come in for a round of Jon Stewart's special blending of mocking. (How many times do you think Chopra's been called "an Indian George Clooney" since this aired?) It's got to ouch a bit. But there's a way to look at it as a very good thing, indeed. Technologists in politics have reached a level of public interest where they're good Daily Show fodder.

Soon, we're going to start bundling these announcements of new open government initiatives that every agency and their mom's are issuing these days, but it makes sense to give some love and attention to the early movers. Here, the Commerce Department details the the steps it's taking. It's worth keeping an eye on what Commerce does on this sort of thing, since it handles a lot of business information, much of it tied to individuals and organizations. How they manage pushing out high-value data sets while respecting the privacy of the folks who are tied to that data -- well, that's going to be worth watching. Here's what Secretary Gary Locke and his team at Commerce say they are doing in response to the White House call for open government...

Three makes a trend! Tim Geithner's Treasury Department just put out a press release touting its open government plan. Or, at least, some core building blocks for a plan to come. Specifically, Treasury committed to the publication of what it sees as three high-value data sets: migration data culled from tax returns, quarterly reports on bank trading and derivatives oversight, and TARP reports newly in XML. Assistant Treasury Secretary for Management Dan Tangherlini had this to say: "This government-wide effort is the next step in creating the conditions for a permanent culture of openness."

And another in what might become a series of "trickle down" effects from the Open Government Directive. This one is less unexpected, given that the Office of Science and Technology was intimately involved the the creation of the directive, but still. There's a Request for Information in today's Federal Register that, inspired by the President's call for (in the words of the RFI) "the rapid disclosure of one of our nation's great assets--information," is trolling for advice on how the public can more meaningfully and easily engage with the scientific and technological research funded by federal agencies. (via Gavin Baker)