Information & Ethics committee  Yes, so let me speak to both of those. First, I think it's not to be discounted, the value of what we might think of as civic hacking or civic participation or civic engagement of all these varieties. The value that has to us as citizens in a democracy should not be underestimated, obviously.

Information & Ethics committee  Again, I hope so. My sense is that in the intervening months there will be ongoing conversations where there is a best-practice sharing that's not dissimilar to the work among the federal agencies in the United States that's been done in the inter-agency group. The President's memorandum on the first day, followed by the open government directive that was issued--the memorandum was in January and the directive was issued in December--set out a loose set of principles and guidelines.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you. Let me be clear, of course, that now I'm back in the private sector as an academic teaching law, so I'm sure current plans are under way of which I may not be aware and can't speak to. But let me give some sense of what was contemplated at the time I was in government when the President made his seminal speech before the United Nations.

Information & Ethics committee  Sure. Let me take the first question first. On releasing all we can and protecting what we must--and I'm sure the others will speak to this as well--let me say first, on the process of just getting started and the process of releasing data, one of the reasons we indicated this concept of high-value data and made the definition quite broad was precisely in order to encourage the hard work of trying to get the data that we could.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Chairman Murphy and members of the committee. Thank you for the honour of appearing before you today to reflect on the meaning and value of open government and to share some of my insights and experiences in working to create an open government culture and practice.