NARA’s Open Government Plan, 2012-2014

The Office of the Federal Register (OFR) and its parent organization, the National Archives and Records Administration, have open government embedded deeply in our shared history and mission. Recently, the National Archives updated its Open Government Plan to include significant initiatives to improve transparency, participation, and collaboration over the next two years.

Since the last update, the agency has implemented almost 70 tasks, including major initiatives in records management, declassification, and the Freedom of Information Act.

Those efforts include:

• Revisiting the strategic planning process to strengthen the culture of open government.
• Launching an internal collaboration network for employees.
• Moving Archives.gov to the cloud and implementing a content management system (CMS).
• Issuing a Records Management Directive to outline a 21^st century framework for managing government records.
• Processing backlog records related to the Katyn Atrocities, POW/MIA concerns, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The OFR once again has a featured place in the plan. Our current open government efforts flow from our tradition of supporting transparency. We were created to provide public notice and due process of law by ensuring that legal issuances could no longer be adopted in secret and arbitrarily enforced against the public. Our modernization plans are an expression of that commitment, and include specific efforts to expand access to regulatory data and other public information.

You can learn more about our allied modernization projects, bulk data applications, data sharing and harmonization projects, and digitization efforts in subsection 5.5 of the plan.  We also discuss our intention to develop mobile apps in partnership with Government Printing Office, as directed by the Administrative Committee of the Federal Register. In a few weeks we will report on the first OFR/GPO mobile app.