The White House hosted a roundtable on using open data for economic outcomes. Here's what we learned, and what we recommended.
Continue readingWhite House guidance on open government asks the right questions
On Thursday, the White House published its long-awaited guidance for federal agencies to comply with President Obama’s 2009 Open Government Directive.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Making dollars and sense of DOJ’s new FOIA fee rule
When the Department of Justice revised its Freedom of Information Act regulations last month, it adopted language that might inflate requesters’ FOIA costs across all agencies.
Continue readingEnterprise data inventories should be open — not hidden from the public
The Sunlight Foundation has spent a lot of time talking about the need for governments to create comprehensive lists of their information holdings — and to release those lists to the public. You can expect more of the same in 2015.
Continue readingStakeholder perspectives heard at DATA Act town hall
Last Friday, the Sunlight Foundation participated in a "data transparency town hall" hosted by the Treasury Department to hear from stakeholders on DATA Act implementation. Our comments are posted here.
Continue readingCircle September 30th for Data Transparency 2014
On Sept. 30th, the leading authorities on the creation and implementation of open data policy for our country are gathering. Data Transparency 2014, co-hosted by the Sunlight Foundation, couldn’t come at a more critical time.
Continue readingAgencies fail to deliver a plan to deliver the data
Eight of the 29 federal executive branch agencies that are required to publish Open Government Plans in compliance with the president's Open Government Directive to have yet to do so.
Continue readingDiverse coalition unites to support strong DATA Act
Today, the Sunlight Foundation joined a diverse group of organizations in supporting the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act), S. 994 and H.R. 2061, legislation that would help to standardize and publish federal spending data.
Continue readingOMB’s DATA Act power grab
The Office of Management and Budget is pushing for changes that would gut the DATA Act, an important piece of federal spending legislation.
Continue readingOpen Data Executive Order Shows Path Forward
Today, the White House is issuing a new Executive Order on Open Data -- one that is significantly different from the open data policies that have come before it -- reflecting Sunlight's persistent call for stronger public listings of agency data, and demonstrating a new path forward for governments committing to open data. This Executive Order and the new policies that accompany it cover a lot of ground, building public reporting systems, adding new goals, creating new avenues for public participation, and laying out new principles for openness, much of which can be found in Sunlight's extensive Open Data Policy Guidelines, and the work of our friends and allies. Most importantly, though, the new policies take on one of the most important, trickiest questions that these policies face -- how can we reset the default to openness when there is so much data? How can we take on managing and releasing all the government's data, or as much as possible, without negotiating over every dataset the government has?
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