Feds' Seat At The Table

To put it charitably, I think the "Your Seat at the Table" feature, which provides documents from meetings the transition team has had with outside groups, on Change.gov is kind of strange. I think the impulse is in some ways a good one. It's good to have a sense of what kind of suggestions interest groups are making (and down the road, will provide a pretty interesting basis for a scorecard of who Obama listened to and who he ignored). But at the moment, the feature is doing a lot more to obscure than it is to illuminate. The database is in no way complete (I know folks who have provided documents that aren't on the site). It's not organized alphabetically, or by date. And I'm not sure how much it serves the purpose of transparency, because the documents give absolutely no sense how the Obama transition team reacted, or even whether someone's actually read the documents.

That said, I've been curious to see what's making it onto the section, and when I checked in today, I found a whole bunch of fed-related documents! There are no real surprises in the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association recommendations, though I do think it's interesting to note that their health-care related goals are first on their priorities list.

More striking is a report from the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda calling increases in the numbers of Latinos in the federal workforce, and slamming the Office of Personnel Management's workforce diversity programs: