One year in, resistance to open government memo lingers

One year after President Barack Obama announced an initiative to open the government, agency leaders have demonstrated a strong track record of embracing emerging media to disclose information, but some mid-level managers have been reluctant to move outside the traditional chain of command.

Agencies must publish at least three new downloadable sets of statistics that hold the government accountable, illuminate their work, share financial opportunities with the public or meet some other need conveyed by citizens. The Obama administration laid the groundwork for this task in May, when it launched a storage space for all manner of federal data sets called Data.gov. But critics have complained that much of the information on Data.gov is not in Web-friendly formats. Some government personnel and technology industry observers expect Friday's releases will be equally hard to use and might not be revealing.