A post from earlier today on the White House blog by Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced the release of two new documents related to the Administration’s “open government” initiatives:

• The Open Government Directive (download as pdf, txt, doc or view on Slideshare)
• The Open Government Progress Report to the American People (download as pdf or view on Slideshare)

The post also includes a video of the live online chat in which federal CIO Vivek Kundra and federal CTO Aneesh Chopra announce the Open Government Plan, during which they fielded some questions in realtime from Facebook and Twitter.

Speaking of the value proposition of the initiative, Chopra explains:

So it’s having the conversation with each of our leaders to find out what are the big objectives that they wish to tackle on behalf of the President’s agenda, and in support of the American people. And how can the principles of Open Government, and in particular the datasets, allow others in the ecosystem to support — and advance on — those activities. We just can’t afford to have a federal government solution for every issue. By relying on the ingenuity of the American people we can advance these policy priorities in new and more creative ways.

I also particularly appreciate their speaking to an attempt to raise the quality of published data, particularly after it was discovered that some folks had provided shoddy data to Recovery.gov earlier this year.