Big news from Washington that everyone misses

Beth Noveck is working at the White House, getting really serious about giving all Americans a serious voice in running our federal government.

She talks about how this is happening at city and state levels in Open Government Laboratories of Democracy:

Inspired by the President’s call for more open government, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts launched its data catalogue, following in the footsteps of Washington, DC, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere around the country (as well as cities in Canada and the UK), to provide public access to information by and about government. What makes this exciting is not merely having transportation information available in machine-readable formats, but that professional and amateur enthusiasts can then get together, as they did last weekend, to create new software applications and data visualizations to better enable public transit riders to track arrival times for the next subway, bus, or ferry. Publishing government information online facilitates this kind of useful collaboration between government and the public that transforms dry data into the tools that improve people’s lives. (For another great example, check out what happened when we published the Federal Register for people to use.)

However, here's the big story:

The Obama Administration is taking unprecedented strides toward creating the most open and accountable government in history.

We  could all use help getting that message out there.