Open Government Bonanza

My Twitter feed blew up yesterday as my friends in the open government community went nuts over the open government plans agencies posted on their websites yesterday. It's understandable: this is the end result of more than a year of effort, with the agencies acting as laboratories of innovation for how to convey information more usefully and transparently to the government. Aliya Sternstein over at NextGov has an important piece up explaining how agencies figured out their programs and decided where to set the bar:

The key part of each plan is a flagship initiative that injects one of the three tenets of open government into a major agency undertaking. For example, as part of the Health and Human Services Department's plan, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is developing a Web site that tracks the costs associated with treating Medicare patients in particular diagnosis-related groups, by state, illness and individual hospital. A test version is live. CMS' next major release is expected in the fall.

HHS' plan goes beyond the directive's requirements by describing not one, but five flagship activities. One of the more elaborate programs will by year's end harvest data sets describing health care performance based on quality, cost, access and disease rates -- from the national to the county level.

...

A HUD spokesman said the department didn't want to create a plan that seemed predetermined and set in stone. "The plan is meant to be a living document -- something like a wiki -- that will invite people to be part of the discussion," said Jerry Brown referring to Web pages that anyone can edit.

It strikes me that this initiative and the labor-management partnership councils have a lot in common. They lay out broad parameters for the agencies, but encourage them to find their own solutions. And both should be intensively studied and measured to see what works, what doesn't, and how and why.