Technology Sector Increases Its Presence in Open Government Dialogue

In addition to nonprofit organizations, educational groups, and individual advocates, corporations have recently begun to stake out positions in the ongoing open government dialogue. Among these private sector actors are Adobe, Google, and Microsoft. These new voices are putting both money and technological resources behind an effort to advance the Obama administration’s commitment to transparency.

Most recently, Adobe made its entry onto the open government scene by hosting a Nov. 4 conference [1] in Washington, DC, with the theme of “moving open government from promise to practice.” The event was heavily advertised with posters, billboards, and television spots. The event featured other big-name corporate technology sponsors, including Oracle and Dell. Although the conference did not specifically focus on Adobe products, some advocates found it ironic that the company would be hosting an open government conference, due to the fact that Adobe utilizes a large number of proprietary technologies.

Some open government organizations have strongly questioned both the ability and the appropriateness of using proprietary technologies, such as Adobe products, to increase access to government information. For instance, the Sunlight Foundation pointed out [2] that agencies often use the PDF format to publish data such as budget tables. However, this method of presenting the information prevents it from being easily parsed and therefore difficult to mash up with other data. Instead, open government groups generally prefer data to be published initially in machine-readable formats such as XML. XML formats can be converted to PDF, but PDF formats cannot convert to XML.

Google is another private sector technology company that has already established its position in the open government dialogue. Google maintains a public policy office in Washington, DC, that interacts with Congress and the executive branch. In June, the company submitted comments [3] to the Office of Science and Technology Policy concerning recommendations for the Open Government Directive. Among the suggestions Google made were that the federal government should utilize an XML Sitemap that informs search engines of pages that can be crawled, that government should make more selective use of robots.txt files on websites, and that government should encourage agencies to publish popularly requested data on agency websites and Data.gov.

A company known for its efforts in open-source and cloud computing technology, it seems that Google has largely been accepted by access advocates as an important voice in the dialogue. On Nov. 17, the company made full-text legal opinions from all U.S. court systems fully searchable and available to the public [4] using Google Scholar. Typically, many of these opinions are held in subscription-only databases such as Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis.

Microsoft has also worked to establish itself as a resource on implementing open government. The company’s biggest project is the Open Government Data Initiative [5] launched in May. The initiative is an attempt to develop a system by which government agencies can publish their data using Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform. This method of dissemination would allow developers to interact with the data and make tools to display that data in a usable format. In this way, the government will be able to automatically refresh and update the data, and the public will have instant access to the most recent data without having to download new copies. (Full disclosure: A Microsoft employee serves on the Board of Directors of OMB Watch.)

On one hand, private corporations give the open government community a powerful ally with deep pockets and a booming voice. On the other hand, the open government community is somewhat suspicious of corporations, which often place profit and private interests ahead of the public good. The question of whether or not the involvement of private corporations is something the community should embrace remains to be answered.