Ready for Open Government?

One of President Obama's first acts when he entered the White House on Jan. 20 was to issue an open government memo. In it, Obama said he wanted agencies to "harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and make them readily available to the public." The idea: Government should be more transparent, work more with agency and business partners, and more actively seek the public's opinion about policies. But the majority of isn't completely sold on the open government initiative, according to a survey of 271 federal managers conducted by the Government Business Council, a business arm of Government Executive, in October. For the most part, federal managers are enthused about making more data available to the public, but they also are mostly satisfied with the amount of interaction they now have with the public, which is not often, according to the survey.