After working several depressing retail jobs in my teenage years, I used to think that it was a kind of... View Article
Continue readingOGD: Future Medicare data looks promising
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services appear to be on to something with their promised new datasets. It's a leap for an agency whose previous offerings were a confusing mishmash of poorly-labeled files. If they continue to add granularity as they roll out more features, journalists could have a useful and innovative set of tools on their hands.
The “Dashboard” CMS intends to create, a demo of which is currently online, looks at Medicare spending on services. It's a good tool for quickly grasping the big picture; you can view data as a bubble chart, for example ...
OGD: Labor releases five enforcement datasets
"I now realize that I must have had my first glimmer of the need for
preventive journalism as a young West Virginian who would hear of a
mine disaster, then read heartbreaking stories of weeping widows and
indignant editorials demanding effective safety regulations. But in the
years that followed, no reporter went down into the mines to see if
they were safer. We only found out they were not after the next
disaster when a new round of heartbreaking articles and indignant
editorials would appear." -- Charles Peters, Understanding government.com
This week the Labor Department began releasing data that reporters ...
White House Announces Leading Practices
CTO Aneesh Chopra blogged an announcement yesterday laying out the Administration’s next steps after the April 7th milestone. The Adminstration’s... View Article
Continue readingOpen Government: idling in the driveway
Sigh. I feel like a disappointed parent. When the details of the Open Government Directive were announced early last December... View Article
Continue readingAgency Compliance with Data Requirement Mixed
I wrote yesterday that we’d be going through agencies’ new open government plans to evaluate their compliance with the data-related... View Article
Continue readingAgency Plans and Data
As I wrote earlier today, Sunlight is going to be particularly focused on data transparency in the new Open Government... View Article
Continue readingOther dangerous mines? Federal data can’t tell you
Monday’s explosion that killed 25 miners at Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia came at a mine that had been flagged by inspectors for a series of violations – 3000 since 1995 and more than 500 in 2009 alone.
How does that compare to other mines? Because of the way the federal government releases the data, we can't say.
Data on safety inspections is published in the Department of Labor’s Mine
Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) Web site, where users can find information
on mine safety, inspections and violations. But getting to it is the hard part ...
Description of Citizenship Database Available – If You’re Willing to Pay Nearly $112,000
After taking nearly four years to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request, the U.S. immigration agency is demanding $111,930 for records that describe what is in a government database of claims for U.S. citizenship – not the actual database itself.
Balking at the agency’s request, the non-profit group that filed the FOIA says the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is acting contrary to President Barack Obama’s openness directive, creating “arbitrary cost barriers” to what should be public information, and may be illegal.
The Transactional Records and Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University-based research ...
OGD: Freeing health care data
We're still tracking government's performance under the Open Government Directive, and we're also asking for specific information to be released. Here's the data we'd like to see on food and drug safety, which we posted over at the Department of Health and Human Services "open" Web page. The agency set up this commenting system as part of President Barack Obama's open government directive. Please take a moment to visit and vote for our suggestions. (Unfortunately the HHS comment format made our paragraphs run together and slightly truncated our comment. This is fixed below.) We ...
Continue reading
59063
