. . . Both the White House and the Open Government advocacy groups plan to assess them.   No good deed goes unnoticed!

By making data more widely available—even if only within the federal government—it will empower a wide range of users to more routinely make fact-based decisions. This has the effect of pushing analysis and decision making down to the front line instead of to staff offices. This could be the beginning of a new performance agenda, which author W. David Stephenson calls “democratizing data.” Support for making such data available more broadly to the public is being pushed by advocacy groups such as the Sunlight Foundation.

A couple weeks ago, I attended the Mercatus Center’s 10th annual ceremony releasing their assessment of how transparent agencies were in reporting their performance via their annually-required performance report under the Government Performance and Results Act. It made me think about how far the whole transparency movement has come.