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The President wrote a memo saying he wanted this on his first day and only now do we have a directive. A directive that asks the various departments to make a plan in the next 4 months. So in the end it's going to take over a year and a half to get from the President's memo that he wants this to a first draft of a plan to actually implement it.

That right there is what's wrong with Government imho

would you expect anything less?
No but I think a lot of people do.

I think a lot of people think the slowness is Government was caused by technologically backwards administrations and that now things are going to be different. My point is even when you have a President that uses a Blackberry and knows what a dataset is Government still takes forever to get things done.

It's like they're trying to convince us this is a good thing. Instead of just telling us what is available now and what the schedule is.
They're probably not trying to convince us, i.e. Hacker News reader types. More likely trying to convince the more general public.
A large part of that broadcast was also targeted at the civilian, middle management Federal bureaucrat. They need buy in from the rank and file content managers of federal program offices because that is where the bulk of the non-headline Federal data lies. (not things like legislation - but rather research, stats, etc)

There is very little groc-ing of these types of efforts on that level because by and large the federal government outsourced all it's IT years ago. The people that run the show at these levels are by and large print journalism people with little experience with the web - much less the open web. They are used to completing a project and getting a "web page" set up for it by simply tasking a contractor to turn a PDF brochure into a web site.

The contractors are set up to act as worker bees rather than consultants and there are very few feds at the middle management level that have an understanding of the underlying technologies to innovate in this area without help. The CTO's office is trying to set up models to follow and help the ideas permeate the civilian workforce.