Declassification: NARA Releases Open Government Plan for 2012-2014

[Stargazer]

NARA Releases Open Government Plan for 2012-2014 by Don on June 14, 2012

Recently, the agency updated its Open Government Plan for 2012-2014. Over the next two years, work around the agency will continue to improve transparency, participation, and collaboration. NARA will strengthen its culture of open government by focusing on common values and restructuring the agency to better serve the American people. A new mentoring program will be launched as well as an internal collaboration network for NARA staff. NARA will work to create an innovative culture that utilizes new and emerging technologies. The strategy for creating digital images of our records will be revised to provide the online access to records the public expects.
As part of the plan’s Flagship Initiative, the National Archives will also continue to expand its crowdsourcing efforts with the public through the Citizen Archivist Dashboard. Activities that “citizen archivists” can get involved in include tagging, transcribing, writing articles, and scanning.
The work of the National Declassification Center is described in section 5.4 of the plan. This section describes our efforts to strengthen open government by improving coordination and collaboration between agencies and effectively streamlining the declassification process.
It’s more than 50 pages, but the updated Open Government Plan is a really interesting document that describes how the work of many offices at the National Archives and Records Administration plays a role in improving open government.

 

[sublight]

I don't think it will change anything. There is a giant amount of tasty stuff that is exempt from declassification and when they do pick something to declassify they have to find subject matter experts, most of which are retired or dead at this point which either delays the process more OR lets them slap an exempt label on the material. I cant help but wonder how much of many engineers best work will end up in an incinerator and never get the kudos they rightfully deserve.

 

[John21]

I feel they take so long to do things on purpose, that way they won't have to take on lots of thèir precious time to look over millions of pages of documents. At the rate things are declassified, it's going to take centuries(an exaggeration, but not by much).

I feel they should end up having a blanket declassification date on certain things after a period of time. Of course certain things like nuclear weapon R&D should be possibly exempt. Who's going to care about secrets in a 35-40 year old piece of equipment or in-house design study?

I for one would love to know more about our atomic demolition munitions and their theoretical tactical usages. They've been out of the inventory for almost 25 years and have all been disposed of, so I see little harm in learning about their use on the battlefield.