As Daniel noted, Friday was a big day for the Open Government Directive. On the timeline (WH version) of what... View Article
Continue readingOGD /Open Pages Come to Life
Meeting or surpassing the White House’s deadline, the 20 agencies we monitored launched their /open pages by this past Saturday... View Article
Continue readingWhite House visitor logs are short on descriptions
The White House released their most recent visitor logs yesterday but except for public events or group tours, it sheds little light on why the President or White House officials met with particular individuals. Though the logs include a column for descriptions of the meetings, for most entries it was left blank.
For instance, about three-quarters of the meetings held by the President include no details about what was discussed or why the meeting was called. The only way to find out is by perusing the names of the visitors and trying to infer, from the identity of the visitor ...
Improvements Needed For High Value Datasets On Data.gov
This morning a number of organizations — POGO, OMB Watch, CREW, National Security Archive, the Center for Democracy and Technology ... View Article
Continue readingMike Stern Uncovers “Treasury’s Lobbying Loopholes”
Mike Stern has found some answers to the question of how, and on what terms, did “Mark Patterson, the former... View Article
Continue readingNew Batch of White House Visitor Logs Released
Last Friday, the White House released a new batch of visitor logs covering last October, fulfilling a pledge they made... View Article
Continue readingSunlight Testimony for Senate Rules Committee
Today the Senate Rules Committee held the first of what’s likely to be a series of hearings on Capitol Hill... View Article
Continue readingMy dog ate my stimulus: Best of Recovery recipients’ excuses
The Obama administration has made an unprecedented effort to use technology to publicly chronicle the flow of massive amounts of stimulus money, but government is slow to adapt, and not all of those who do business with it are so tech-savvy.
Inaccuracies in Recovery.gov data, from too-high job creation numbers to dollar amounts for awards given as "999999999" (probably as a placeholder) to reams of blank fields, make it difficult to assess how well or poorly the stimulus is doing. Many of those problems can be laid at the feet of those providing the information: the recipients of grants ...
Key Dates in the Fiscal 2011 Budget Process
When it comes to open, transparent government, there are few things more important to many of our readers than shining some sunlight on the federal budget. Put simply, people want to know how our money is spent - especially since just about every dollar we make between January and May is "spent" on our taxes. And for all that "investment" in our government, it's one of the only things in our lives we don't get a receipt for.
Continue readingCitizens United Response, Part 1 – Independent Expenditures
As Ellen noted last Friday, we’ve crafted an agenda in response to the Citizens United decision, setting up the disclosure... View Article
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