Two federal agencies seek feedback to inform updates to their open government plans as the 2 year deadline for refreshing them comes due this spring. 

The Open Government Directive requires executive departments and agencies to update open government plans biennially, meaning refreshed plans should be unveiled no later than April 8, 2012.

In a Jan. 17 blog post, HHS Chief Technology Officer Todd Park requested feedback on how the department can improve its open government efforts. He also said the department will post a draft plan on hhs.gov/open by late March for public comments. The Transportation Department invited the public to participate in an open government dialogue, which will close in early March, to inform the next version of the plan.

The required update isn't the only thing forcing agencies to revisit plans, said Amy Bennett, assistant director of OpenTheGovernment.org. The White House's National Action Plan--crafted in September 2011 as part of the Open Government Partnership--lists improving implementation of agency open government plans as a goal. Bennett said this element of accountability in the NAP is refreshing, as White House attention to agencies' open government commitments "was noticeably absent over the last two years."

"Implementation of the plans has been very uneven across the federal government. Some agencies are faithfully meeting their commitments; other agencies are not," said Bennett.

According to analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, many of the datasets agencies set out to release in 2010 are now available and the tools they committed to create are under development. But other agencies are falling short of their goals, said John Wonderlich, policy director of the Sunlight Foundation in a Dec. 7, 2011 post.

"The Commerce Secretary never put up a schedule...the Department of Justice apparently decided that none of the data they identified for public release was fit for publication on Data.gov. Perhaps most egregiously, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded part of their plan to post a schedule for new data to be released, and released a new version of the plan scrubbed of that milestone," wrote Wonderlich.

The Defense Department didn't even show up in Sunlight Foundation analysis because "they hardly set any deadlines at all," he wrote.

For more:
- see the HHS post
- see the DOT dialogue
- see the Sunlight Foundation post

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