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Methodology, Part I: How to Score the Obama Administration's Information Policy

After hearing various piecemeal accounts of how the Obama Administration has been treating government information, it occurred to me that a score card could be a rather useful thing.

This is a big no-no in legal and academic writing, but I'm going to start with the caveats:

1) Truth be told, I think it's a touch early to be "grading" the Obama Administration on much. It hasn't even been 6 months since he was sworn in as President of the United States. And the executive branch of the government has a lot on its collective plate: 2 formal wars, a deeply troubled (and troubling) economy, and an international campaign against terrorism is just what we started with at the beginning of the administration and things haven't exactly slowed down since January '09.

2) How does one define federal information policy? It encompass a lot or a little. Can it even be reasonably considered a cohesive thing? Does the Obama Administration have such a cohesive policy? Are its decisions in this area being guided by a single set of principles, or are they the result of ad hoc, by-hook-or-by-crook reasoning?

3) And in a combination of the above concerns ... should the administration's information policy, as we've seen implemented for lo this almost half-year, be a priority in light of the many crises facing the U.S. right now? The country has hemorrhaged millions of jobs, with a wave of house foreclosure and credit card defaults growing, and the war in Afghanistan is growing hotter (with Pakistan being drawn deeper into the fray against the Taliban). Does it really matter if whitehouse.gov can be indexed by crawlers or if White House visitor logs are available via FOIA requests?

Now that I've set up these strawmen, let me try lighting a match ...

Information policy may include everything from intellectual property protection and enforcement to censorship to distribution of government information. For the purpose of this post, and hopefully future ones, my discussion of federal information policy will focus on the principles and implementation of policies to release or constrain information by and about the federal government, including raw data, publications, government-funded experts and logs of government activity. This is a general sphere of government information that may be released voluntarily, be subject to statutory obligations for dissemination, or is/once was available to the public via FOIA.

I will also admit a bias here: I think government openness, transparency and accountability are important values and my intent is to focus on issues and policies that contribute or directly influence perceptions of those values. In truth, a lot of what I intend to look at is already covered by a wonderful resource and community, Free Government Information (FGI). I cannot replicate the breadth of what they do, nor the depth. But I want to take a step back, take a mosaic view of the range of policy and actions ... to see the big picture.

It is rather soon to start grading the Obama Administration (for this post. from herein, I'll use the term "Obama" to refer to the entire administration as opposed to the man himself). But it is not too soon to a) laud Obama; b) criticize Obama; and c) push Obama for more. And rather than do this willy-nilly, it would behoove those of us who care about access to information and information policy to look at this as a cohesive policy, with guiding principles and objectives. If for no other reason, even spur-of-the-moment decisions can take on the weight of precedent and what may be a single action one day may become a trend months later and codified years later.

And it's hard to see how 'accidental' policy promotes the values of openness, transparency and accountability.

So, the purpose of this scorecard: to create benchmarks for federal information policy actions that could be used to evaluate individual actions and general Administration trends, and be used as a basis of discussion and advocacy in this area across multiple stakeholders in the information community (librarians and information professionals, researchers and scientists, the general public, government agencies themselves).

Or at the very least get people talking about these issues. Pushing for more openness and transparency may be necessary, and we need to know what we are talking about if we want attention to be paid.

How will I do this? Basically, look at relevant incidents and evaluate them. Sounds simple, doesn't it? I think the details will be in another post.

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