Your daily look at #OpenGov news, events, & analysis. Today’s theme: The importance of official statistics.

open data inventory

In January Open Data Watch updated their Open Data Inventory to reflect changes in 2016. The inventory “assesses the coverage and openness of official statistics” for nearly every country across the globe.

• You can view a ranked list of countries here with scores broken down into categories focused on coverage of official statistics and their openness. In 2016 In 2016, Sweden took the top spot. The Czech Republic, Norway, Poland, Lithuania, Denmark, Estonia, Canada, the United States and Finland round out the top 10. Read the full report here.
• Open Data Watch’s Inventory, specifically focused on official statistics and the Sustainable Development Goals, fits into a broader framework of global openness assessments. Reporters Without Borders maps global press freedom, FreedomHouse looks at the state of democracies, and Open Knowledge looks at a wide range of data for their Global Open Data Index

where is all the data going?

• The potential for Congress to de-fund government statistics and data collection represent a major concern for open data in the U.S., as Sunlight’s Alex Howard explained to CNN recently: “There are lots of reasons to be concerned about the future of open government data in the U.S., but it’s not because of it being taken offline, although that’s a risk factor…It’s that it might be de-funded in Congress.”
• More on the importance of robust statistics: In 2010 Canada changed its rules, making it voluntary for citizens to fill out the long-form version of its census. This change resulted in a drop in the response rate “to 68 per cent in 2011, down from 93 per cent in 2006. The drop was widely viewed as diminishing the value of the statistical information.” (CBC News Canada) The mandatory long-form census was reinstated in 2015 leading to record response rates in 2016. The first batch of 2016 data is up for perusal now. (Center for Data Innovation)

State of the states

• “On Wednesday the city of San Diego revealed plans for a massive sensor network that will use city street lights to deploy 3,200 sensors for air, traffic and pedestrian safety monitoring.” The city hopes to compete with leading ‘smart cities’ like Dubai and Singapore. (StateScoop)
• The Arizona state senate moved to institute harsh penalties for taking part in a protest that turns into a riot. “The legislation expands the state’s racketeering laws so that they include rioting.” Critics argue that it could result in limits on free speech. (The Hill)

Letters

• We also joined with groups including OpenTheGovernment.org, the Project on Government Oversight, Demand Progress, and more on comments to the Office of Government Information Services that aim “to ensure the OGIS regulations uphold requesters’ rights under the FOIA statute, and do not place restrictive confidentiality requirements on requesters who chose to use OGIS’s mediation and dispute resolution services.” (OpenTheGovernment.org)