Open Government

The Open Government section covered the broader transparency project — FOIA reform, classification policy, public-records access, and the international Open Government Partnership — that ran adjacent to but didn't fully overlap with the Open Data section's portal-and-dataset focus. The defining context was the January 2009 Obama 'Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act' establishing a presumption of disclosure, the September 2011 launch of the OGP with its eight founding-cohort countries, and the parallel state-level pattern of incremental rollback of public-records access that the Reporters Committee, Sunlight, and the National Freedom of Information Coalition tracked.

Two debates structured the section's coverage. The first was the proactive-versus-reactive transparency debate — whether routine open-data publication could substitute for individual FOIA requests, and what each approach lost relative to the other. The second was the classification-reform debate, intensified by the November 2010 WikiLeaks Cablegate disclosure and the post-Manning-then-post-Snowden hardening of inter-agency information sharing. The magazine's open-government section took the harder-side positions on both: FOIA still mattered, classification was substantially over-applied, and the post-Cablegate response was likely to undermine rather than advance transparency.

Reading these pieces back, the durable contributions were the state-level rollback tracking — the Hawaii, Indiana, Wisconsin, Texas, Florida, and Ohio cases that aggregated into a single 'death by a thousand cuts' trajectory — and the OGP commitment-versus-delivery analysis that anticipated the framework's later independent-reporting-mechanism reviews. The 2016 FOIA Improvement Act resolved some but not all of the questions raised here.