Obama must use better technology to open government

President-elect Barack Obama should follow through on promises to develop advanced online capabilities that will make government more transparent and not rely so heavily on the contracting community to do so, a bipartisan organization recommended in a report released on Wednesday.

Comment on this article in The Forum."As the Information Age continues to progress, it has become woefully apparent how far behind the federal government lags in modern information management and disclosure," the nonprofit group OMB Watch concluded in a report it sent to Obama and Congress.

Agencies store information in formats that often make it difficult to access and search, for example, and federal executives typically don't push their agencies to develop applications that encourage interaction with the public, OMB Watch said. Also, procedures for properly preserving government data in electronic format for historic reference and public access are lacking, according to the report.

"President-elect Obama seems interested in improving interactivity with government and the public, but we'd like to see a commitment -- the broad strokes of a plan to figure out how to make it happen," said Sean Moulton, director of information policy at OMB Watch.

The group urged the Obama administration to make good on promises to advance government's use of collaborative capabilities such as wikis, online comments and dialogues to allow the public to participate in policy proceedings as they happen. OMB Watch also wants to see the new administration regularly use online tools such as Internet feeds and e-mail notifications to disseminate information to the public quickly.

In addition, Obama should encourage agencies to release published records rather than wait for a member of the public to request the record under the Freedom of Information Act, the report stated. The new president should appoint in his first few weeks in office a government transparency officer, who would use online surveys and other methods to identify documents and databases that citizens would most like to see made publicly available, it added.

OMB Watch suggested using an application similar to the one it uses on a Web site the group developed to track government spending, fedspending.org. The tool would allow the public to search by company all public interactions it has had with the federal government, including funding, regulatory issues and legal actions.

Agencies' heavy reliance on service contracts, however, creates an obstacle to developing applications that make government more transparent, OMB Watch reported. Obama should instruct agencies to deploy free, commercially available technologies that are widely used by citizens such as instant messaging and blogging software and not be bound by the government service contracts that restrict flexibility, consume resources and slow progress.

"Agencies have been bled dry of their technology capacity," Moulton said. "They contract out everything relating to technology, which creates this divide, and when they get something back, it's not as functional as it could have been if those that know the data and the audience played a bigger role in the process.

"There's no simple magic bullet," he said. "It requires coordination with the [chief information officers] and technology people in agencies, as well those outside government that contribute to this bigger audience. Government needs to take a page out of [industry's] playbook and do a better job of tapping into [citizens'] priorities."