A Sunlight FOIA request has turned into effective policy: The Obama administration now instructs all agencies to illuminate not just public datasets, but private assets as well. It ensures the public will have the fullest knowledge of agency data holdings.
Continue readingAfter Sunlight FOIA, comprehensive data indexes arrive on Data.gov
Sunlight has already identified indicators of varying levels of success in indexing government information, some datasets that appear to be wisely withheld and datasets that could be of significant public value if released.
Continue readingA big win for open government: Sunlight gets U.S. to release indexes of federal data
For the first time, the United States government has agreed to release what we believe to be the largest index of government data in the world.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Transparency is not just television
Our problem has been far too little transparency in the legislative chamber — not too much.
Continue readingHyperlinks and hope: Data.gov five years out
Five years into the Obama administration’s experiment with Data.gov marks a good time to ask — is the experiment a success?
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Data.gov relaunches on open source platform CKAN
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions 
of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Irina Bolychevsky is the Product Owner of CKAN -- data management system that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data. (@CKANproject) is the leading open source data management platform, at the Open Knowledge Foundation (@OKFN). She led and managed the new release of data.gov from the CKAN team and previously managed the relaunch of data.gov.uk. Follow her on twitter: @shevski.
A huge milestone was reached yesterday with the relaunch of the U.S. government data portal on a single, open source platform. A joint collaboration between a small UK team at the Open Knowledge Foundation and data.gov, this was an ambitious project to reduce the numerous previous catalogs and repositories into one central portal for serious re-use of government open data.
Catalog.data.gov brings together both geospatial as well as “raw” (tabular or text) data under a single roof in a consistent standardised beautiful interface that can be searched, faceted by fomat, publisher, community or keyword as well as filtered by location.
Users can quickly and easily find relevant or related data (no longer a metadata XML file!), download it directly from the search results page or preview spatial map layers or CSV files in the browser.
Of course, there is still work to do, especially about improving the data quality, but nonetheless a vast amount of effort went into metadata cleanup, hiding records with no working links and adding a flexible distributed approval workflow to allow review of harvested datasets pre-publication.
Continue readingA Sunshine Week Call for Greater Transparency
As part of Sunshine week, I had the opportunity to testify at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing to share a few of Sunlight's ideas about making the executive branch more transparent. Video and text of my opening statement are below. It almost goes without saying that we're very interested in the transparency bills the Oversight Committee will be marking up this Wednesday.
Sunlight’s Priorities for the Next Administration
Regardless of who wins the presidential election, the next administration will have enormous power to say how open our government will be. We have organized our priorities for the next administration below, to share where we think our work on executive branch issues will be focused, in advance of the election results. From money in politics to open data, spending, and freedom of information, we'll be working to open up the Executive Branch. We'd love to hear any suggestions you might have for Sunlight's Executive Branch work, please leave additional ideas in the comments below. (We'll also be sharing other recommendations soon, including a legislative agenda for the 113th Congress, and a suite of reform proposals for the House and Senate rules packages.) Sunlight Reform Agenda for the Next Administration:
Continue readingThe Missing Open Data Policy
Open data policies aren’t doing nearly as much good as they can, because they usually fail to require new information... View Article
Continue readingA Look at EPA & Commerce on Data.gov
Last month I looked at the report the Department of Transportation issued in response to President Obama’s January 18, 2011,... View Article
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