Public engagement in democracy requires information sharing by government so citizens can mull and propose better ways to meld community objectives with public sector resources and influence. Sharing of government information occurs voluntarily or involuntarily. Disclosure laws can pry the lid off the lock box. In Washington State we have the Public Records Act. In the other Washington, there’s the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Obama

But for years federal agencies have generally taken a grudging approach to FOIA compliance, often deciding information shall remain confidential not really because it must, but to avoid uncomfortable public scrutiny. Last year, responding to a directive from President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder published guidelines for federal agencies to improve their responsiveness to FOIA requests. Obama said in his directive, “The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.”

There should be a “presumption of openness,” the President stated, which A.G. Holder later wrote means: 1) that federal agencies shouldn’t deny information requests simply because it’s legal under FOIA; and 2) that where full compliance isn’t possible (for reasons of national security, law enforcement, personal privacy or privileged information) agencies should closely consider partial disclosure. Holder also directed agencies to make better responsiveness to FOIA a cross-enterprise endeavor – not merely the bailiwick of a compliance officer; and to post online request guidelines, and improve request tracking and customer service.

Today, on the first day of “Sunshine Week,” a report from the National Security Archive at Georgetown University says there’s still a long way to go.

The archive – a broad-ranging depository of declassified federal documents – filed its own FOIA request last September seeking internal documentation from all federal agencies on their plans for liberalizing public disclosure procedures under FOIA, as Obama and Holder had directed. The archive’s report today finds that of 90 federal agencies, 52 either did not reply or had no records to demonstrate improvements made; 11 agencies merely circulated and discussed the Obama and Holder directives; 14 changed staff training on FOIA response procedures; and 13 implemented concrete policy changes. Meanwhile, old FOIA requests – some made as long as 18 years ago – languish, unfilled. FOIA requests for data from presidential libraries, in particular, continue to gather dust.

It’s early, and FOIA isn’t the only ball game in town. There’s also voluntary disclosure using Web site “dashboards” displaying cross-agency arrays of data sets for public consumption, as at the federal Data.Gov site and locally, at Data.Seattle.Gov. Yet here too, the excitement right now is more about the potential for data to serve as a real collaborative tool than about any comprehensive, and notably comprehensible, accumulation of important public information. Moving from the former to the latter will require citizen activists to speak up, constructively and specifically, about what they’d like to see. I’m trying to do my part. What sort of government data would you like to see made more readily available online?