Panelist notes politics of putting agency information online, by Aliya Sternstein, National Journal's Technology Daily, June 19, 2007 PM edition. (reprinted in GovExec and available without subscription)

Patrice McDermott, executive director of OpenTheGovernment.org, chose to participate in a Tuesday workshop sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium and the Web Science Research Initiative because she wants to convince techies that the government's underutilization of the Internet has a lot to do with politics.

...She said that at the workshop, attendees told her that government agencies just need to make their databases available on the Internet, and others in the online community will reformat the contents so the information is compatible with new technologies. "Others will create the [topical] tags" that allow the content to be integrated into advanced Web technologies, they said.

McDermott's reply: The policy is already there to do that. "It's been there for years. It's just not being enforced. It takes leadership from the White House."