On Tuesday, the Obama administration issued its Open Government Directive. It calls on Federal Agencies to publish data that had not been previously available and to use open formats that can be more easily downloaded, searched and analyzed.

It also called on Federal Agencies to create portals, in the form, http://www.agency.gov/open and http://www.whitehouse.gov/open is up as an example.

Wednesday, I received a press release from the Department of Justice about their Fiscal Year 2008 Freedom of Information Act Requests which talked a little bit about their efforts to be more open.

I downloaded the spreadsheet detailing data about the Department of Education’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) processing. The Education Department has the equivalent of about 33 people working full time on FOIA requests. FOIA processing requests are about $1.9 million, with an additional $100,000 in legal fees. 2,236 requests were processed and the average time to process a simple request was 111 days. There were 67 requests for expedited processing, of which ten were granted. There were 326 requests for fee waiver, of which only 4 were granted.

Processing FIOA requests are expensive and cost money, and this is something that people need to keep in mind during the discussions about the future of journalism. Us volunteer, citizen journalists and bloggers are unlikely to fork out of our own pockets the money it takes to get big FOIA requests processed.

On the other hand, making more information available for free on the Internet could significantly cut down the amount of FOIA requests. It will be interesting to see a long-term analysis of the trend in FOIA requests following the implementation of the Open Government Directive.

I sent off a quick email to a friend at the Department of Justice with my suggestion about something that could make the Federal Judiciary much more open. Court records and documents for the U.S. Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy Courts are available in a system called Pacer. Currently, reporters and bloggers wishing to get access to these records must pay eight cents per page to access the data online. I can understand why you might charge eight cents a page for something that needs to be photocopied, but data distributed over the Internet shouldn’t cost eight cents a page.

In terms of the timeliness of information, the FCC and FTC are pretty good about making comments that they’ve received available online in a timely basis. They have systems in place to facilitate that. They may not be as easy to navigate as I would like, but they are a great starting point. Other governmental agencies do not have this ability.

This was driven home to me yesterday when the Connecticut General Assembly Appropriations Committee held a public hearing on the latest proposed budget cuts.

Over 350 people came to testify, which means over 350 documents needing to be scanned in and made available as part of the public record. This is likely to take a week or two of time from the overburdened staffers of the committee. In addition, numerous other people submitted testimony via email. The technology is not in place for those emails to be made automatically available online or forwarded to interested parties, so they will be included with the over 350 documents waiting to be scanned.

If more of this information could be made available immediately, the way the FCC and FTC do, or perhaps even made available in such a way that they could be loaded into an online system where people could rate, tag, and comment on the documents, a richer and more nuanced discussion of how best to allocated limited resources could take place.

The Federal Open Government Directive is a great starting point in making government more efficient and more responsive. It will be great to see how it gets implemented over the coming months. It will be even greater if state and local governments and even nonprofits adopt similar directives.

(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)