One of the very important things that happened just before the Christmas holiday break was that the Director of the Office of Management and Budget issued the Open Government Directive (OGD), which requires all heads of executive departments and agencies in the US federal government to take concrete steps to implement transparency, participation, and collaboration as directed in the President’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, issued by President Obama in January, 2009.

One of the key objectives of the OGD is to make government information available online in open formats and in a timely fashion.  Also interestingly the goal of the OGD is not only freedom of information, but also explicitly to create economic opportunity.

Some excerpts,

“To increase accountability, promote informed participation by the public, and create economic opportunity, each agency shall take prompt steps to expand access to information by making it available online in open formats.

“Timely publication of information is an essential component of transparency.   Delays should not be viewed as an inevitable and insurmountable consequence of high demand.

 “To the extent practicable and subject to valid restrictions, agencies should publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.”

The OGD is very specific about time frame.       

“Within 45 days, each agency shall identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value data sets … and register those data sets via Data.gov. These must be data sets not previously available online or in a downloadable format.”