OMB memo: A high-tech step backward?

Updated guidance on implementation of economic stimulus funds released by the Office of Management and Budget last week is a technological step backward, some Web experts are warning.

Unlike the 62-page initial guidance document, OMB Director Peter Orszag's more detailed 175-page April 3 memo does not characterize e-mail-based reporting as an intermediary step nor does it require that Web feeds become the only way for information to flow from agencies, argues Erik Wilde, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley. Such a system would have helped advance the federal information architecture and assure that the same information sent to OMB from departments could also be consumed by the public, he said in a recent blog post.

The new guidelines make it clear that feeds are optional, and even if they are provided, they can be RSS or Atom format, he said. There is no specification of how data should be included in the feed nor is there a requirement for paged or archived feeds.

"Feeds may not be prohibited by the new guidelines, but they certainly do not help at all to make feeds a reliable or robust source of information," Wilde wrote. The apparent about-face is understandable, he said, since implementing a federated feed-based regime would have been a challenge. "It really was not the smartest move to ask for a convenient short-term one-stop-shop, instead of recognizing that this could be a landmark shift in how information architecture is designed and exposed in the federal government," he said.

Click here to read the updated OMB guidelines.