Ibrahim also knows that the gains made by advocates for openness and democracy can vanish quickly.
Advocates for openness in government, who had been pressing for the moves, said they were pleased.
While advocating for openness, Mr. Coburn is also placing a philosophical bet that the more the public learns about federal spending, the less it will want.
John Wonderlich, policy director of the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for openness in government, wrote on the group's blog that the decision "prioritizes a lavish celebration over the integrity of the office," and that Mr. Obama was "turning away from a principled approach to money in politics".
Blair Levin, managing director at Stifel Nicolaus and former chief of staff at the F.C.C., said he thought that there was an ongoing debate at Google on this issue, between advocates for openness and those who thought the company could build a better wireless service and out-innovate the rest of the industry.
Facebook has said a lot about its "openness", but advocates for openness and data portability have long criticized the site for being something of a black hole of information.
Moreover, directors need to be advocates for openness.
In every generation, these two threads of our national narrative — the one that advocated for openness and the other that was exclusionary — have been in competition.
Christi Parsons, a White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, defended the salary as appropriate because the group's primary objective, she said, is not scholarship fundraising, but advocating for openness at the White House.
According to the Cabinet Office, he is well known in the open standards community as an advocate for the openness and interoperability of systems.
