On June 3, OMB Watch has produced its analysis of the public comments sent to the NAPA website as part of the first phase in the government's Open Government Initiative.  You can find the 14-page analysis here.  The product is in addition to NAPA's own analysis of the data produced on June 1.

The analysis produced by NAPA assumed a categorization based on the administration’s broad open government priorities of transparency, citizen participation, collaboration, and capacity building.  The OMB Watch analysis is more narrowly focused and targeted toward identifying the public’s commitment to the spirit of the open government recommendations established in the Right-to-Know community’s November 2008 report to the presidential transition team.  This analysis categorized the recommendations into issue areas of: National Security & Secrecy, Usability of information, and Creating an Environment of Openness.

To conduct this analysis, we grouped recommendations from the survey into the broad themes discussed in the 21st Century Right-to-Know report.  The analysis also includes those unique ideas which went beyond the scope of our specific recommendations but still fit into the general categories.

NAPA’s API made it difficult for non-government users to access the data from the IdeaScale survey in a usable format, delaying this analysis and frustrating others interested in summarizing the public comments.  The API, when it finally worked, only provided public access to the top 50 recommendations.  Greg Elin, formerly of the Sunlight Foundation, had to scrape the data from the site.  To see the data after we categorized it into color coded sections you may download the Excel file here.