Administration says Open Gov Directive on track

With about a week to go before their first deadline, the Obama administration is saying that the Open Government Directive, the keystone effort to increase online access to government data, is on schedule. In a public webcast on Thursday morning, Aneesh Chopra, the administration's chief technology officer, said that officials were meeting weekly to keep progress on track. He promised that "each of our key agencies will release what we call high value data sets" in time to meet the directive's first (and impending) January 22 deadline, which requires each agency to identify and publish in three such data sets online in an open format. "We are meeting, we are talking, we are trading ideas. No significant delays are expected at the present time," said Norm Eisen, the administration's special counsel for ethics and government reform, in response to a question from Ellen Scott of ExecutiveGov during a conference call with reporters earlier this week. "We're working to hit our marks."