What was exciting about working on the open government plan was the opportunity to really create a plan based on open government. The process we used was to ask folks for their opinion. What would they like us to release? What kind of data do they want to see up there? We used a social media tool, IdeaScale, to ask the public to participate and tell us what they'd like to see available.
They said a lot of the things that folks on our staff who work with the public already knew were important--census records, native American records. But they confirmed that through this IdeaScale tool. We took that back to the folks doing digitization in the work we're doing now and we prioritized it based on their comments.
What was really interesting with the open government plan was that a lot of the information we gathered over the months, where we asked the public for input, actually got incorporated into the plan. In years past, when we put things online we'd get a lot of comments right away. There wasn't that much comment when it came online because they had already done so much commenting, other than to confirm that they were happy with what we had done.