

White House CIO & CTO Launching Open Government Plan live online at 11AM ET - jgilliam
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/12/07/streaming-11-am-cto-chopra-and-cio-kundra-launch-open-government-plan

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jokull
It's like they're trying to convince us this is a good thing. Instead of just
telling us what is available now and what the schedule is.

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tome
They're probably not trying to convince _us_ , i.e. Hacker News reader types.
More likely trying to convince the more general public.

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mschwar99
A large part of that broadcast was also targeted at the civilian, middle
management Federal bureaucrat. They need buy in from the rank and file content
managers of federal program offices because that is where the bulk of the non-
headline Federal data lies. (not things like legislation - but rather
research, stats, etc)

There is very little groc-ing of these types of efforts on that level because
by and large the federal government outsourced all it's IT years ago. The
people that run the show at these levels are by and large print journalism
people with little experience with the web - much less the open web. They are
used to completing a project and getting a "web page" set up for it by simply
tasking a contractor to turn a PDF brochure into a web site.

The contractors are set up to act as worker bees rather than consultants and
there are very few feds at the middle management level that have an
understanding of the underlying technologies to innovate in this area without
help. The CTO's office is trying to set up models to follow and help the ideas
permeate the civilian workforce.

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SamAtt
The President wrote a memo saying he wanted this on his first day and only now
do we have a directive. A directive that asks the various departments to make
a plan in the next 4 months. So in the end it's going to take over a year and
a half to get from the President's memo that he wants this to a first draft of
a plan to actually implement it.

That right there is what's wrong with Government imho

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riffic
would you expect anything less?

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SamAtt
No but I think a lot of people do.

I think a lot of people think the slowness is Government was caused by
technologically backwards administrations and that now things are going to be
different. My point is even when you have a President that uses a Blackberry
and knows what a dataset is Government still takes forever to get things done.

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pmorici
After they spent 18 million redesigning the recovery.gov website,
[http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/07/18m-being-spent-
to-...](http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-
recoverygov-web-site.html) resulting in an end product that provides false
information [http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jobs-saved-created-
congressio...](http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jobs-saved-created-
congressional-districts-exist/story?id=9097853) why should we be optimistic
that this isn't just another hole to throw money down? As I recall the
recovery site was sold to the people as a step towards open government.

