I think that's true, and I would strongly support what the other witnesses have said about the success and really the momentum. To me, the greatest success is the fact that there is a community that has been created with representation across every agency of people who are working on and care about this issue and are taking it back into their own agencies and building a culture of innovation in their agencies. For every person who comes to the inter-agency committee meeting, there are another dozen or two dozen or hundred people managing the process back in the agencies who are empowered.
Let me speak to the limits really quickly. By no means are we there yet. Policy is still largely made behind closed doors within that bubble that was talked about. This is something that is going to change over time as we develop these more productive and collaborative relationships.
People don't participate yet. To the question that was asked earlier about we're building it and are they coming, I think that's still something evolving as people are learning, not just within government but outside of government, that there is this opportunity to engage and to take it seriously and that they'll be listened to.
We need far better tools than we have. If we want to get people to engage or collaborate with them, we don't yet really have in government tools for effective participation. We also are dealing with huge manual backlogs of information, whether it's in the classification space or the patent space or the FOIA space. There's a great need and there's a shift now towards new technologies that will enable faster processing of these enormous backlogs to get to transparency faster.
There's also the question of how we start to create data in a digital open format from the get-go, so changing so much about the legacy systems and culture, which means not just trying to work backwards but to actually go forward and start to build openness and collaboration into how public sector institutions work. It's still one of the great challenges but also one of the great opportunities that I think is in front of us.