From Nextgov.com
New media advocates see cracks in Obama's open government push
By Aliya Sternstein
President Obama was criticized during the presidential campaign for promoting himself as a community organizer. It could be even harder to prove he's an online community organizer in executing his open government project, say new media advocates outside of Washington....
On May 21, Obama launched the first leg of the open government initiative he promised to implement the day after taking office. The plan includes three phases of public involvement, mostly via the Web, to devise recommendations for creating a more transparent and participatory government....
Other new media specialists observed that the slow development of Recovery.gov, a site established to provide data for tracking stimulus spending, does not bode well for this new endeavor. "I've seen some of the reporting architecture developed by federal officials, and it looks really good," said Eric Kansa, executive director of the Information and Service Design Program at the University of California Berkley School of Information. "There are really good people who know how to do these things, but there seems to be some breakdown in leadership."
Leadership "is going to become a much bigger issue when you get into something as a big as an open government initiative and something like a Data.gov," he added.
The open government launch coincided, intentionally, with the release of Data.gov, a free site that strives to provide raw federal statistics in formats anyone can download and manipulate. "In order for Data.gov to be a success and for the open government initiative to be a success, agencies in the federal government need to embrace Web-style [network] architectures," said Kansa, who studies ubiquitous online access to research data....