Farm subsidies have a way of inciting people. Here, in the words of the Environmental Working Group, is why:
Just ten percent of America's largest and richest farms collect almost three-fourths of federal farm subsidies cash payments that too often promote harmful environmental practices.
For the past five years, EWG has undertaken the arduous task of acquiring subsidy-payment data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Freedom of Information Act, cleaning up millions of records and assembling them into a database that can be searched by name, county, city, farm program, crop and congressional district. The database ...
Pentagon Weapons Test Report Harder to Get Since 9/11
Until Sept. 11, 2001, a little-known but indispensible annual report by the Defense Department gave the public a window into whether the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars spent each year led to weapons that work. Then, the reports by the Pentagons director of Operational Test and Evaluation were pulled from the website.
In the case of this specific report, the thinking was, why advertise that our weapons dont work, said Tom Christie, who was director of the test office from July 2001 through January 2005. The office was created by Congress to examine if weapons worked as well and ...
Every Non-Profit is an Open Government Non-Profit
Why your non-profit stands to benefit from Open Data
Often times at Sunlight the non-profit community looks at us strangely. Here in Washington, DC we've probably made more investments in technology than any other non-profit or advocacy organization I've run across. Certainly our mission is focused around the use of technology, so that makes a lot of sense-- we're focused on getting data out of government, doing interesting things with it, and letting you see what happens in Washington better. That means technology investment.
But one question I struggle with is: why doesn't every non-profit advocate for open data from the Government? Don't ALL of them stand to benefit?
Continue readingAre the American People short on ideas?
A couple of developers from the Sunlight Labs community, including one of our Great American Hackathon organizers Jessy Cowan-Sharp, managed to put together something remarkable: OpenGovTracker (source here). The site lets you see where the ideas are coming in across the various agencies from a single dashboard.
What's the synopsis? According to this it's that the American People don't have a lot of ideas. Well-- a lot of agencies are pretty low on ideas. Only 611 ideas have been proposed. Treasury only has a dozen ideas? The best the American people can do is give Social Security 10 new ideas?.
As our the Sunlight Foundation's Policy director stated late last week: now is the time. Request a dataset or submit an idea to government. Here's how.
Continue readingFDA Lags USDA in Accessible Food Safety Data
Salmonella in peanut butter. E. coli in cookie dough. Tainted Serrano peppers. Fetid Chinese seafood. All these recent problems fell within the domain of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which shares food inspection responsibilities with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA inspects meat, poultry and some egg products while the FDA monitors everything else. Food-safety advocates say the USDA is more forthcoming about its inspection activities and are prodding the FDA to do better.
Almost two years ago, Washington, D.C.-based Food & Water Watch filed a lawsuit against the FDA after it refused to release ...
Free yourself from the Shackles of “High Value Data”
"High Value Datasets" is a bunk term.
When the feds introduced the term High Value Data, my immediate response here was "what the heck is 'High Value Data'?!" We quickly extracted the definition from the Open Government Directive and here it is:
"High-value information is information that can be used to increase agency accountability and responsiveness; improve public knowledge of the agency and its operations; further the core mission of the agency; create economic opportunity; or respond to need and demand as identified through public consultation."
Now we've had a chance to go through and take a look at some of the datasets. Our http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com is having a field day analyzing the data, pointing out flaws in the data and generally doing a great job of figuring out what's actually new in the datasets.
Continue readingDC Gov Builds Amazing Open Gov Dashboard
On Saturday, the White House released its Open Government Dashboard. It features a big chart with 29 agencies on it measured by four attributes. I suspect that the technology behind this dashboard is likely an excel file, alongside staffers or interns checking each agency website for compliance. It's a start of something-- but a chart does not a dashboard make.
Here in Washington DC, amidst a couple feet of snow (with more on the way!), Mayor Fenty released Track, a real way for citizens to watch their government's performance. Both substance wise and technically, it out-atheletes the White House's Open Government dashboard.
More on how after the jump
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 readingBuilding a National Campaign for Transparency
When we got back into the office here at Sunlight on January 4th, we knew 2010 was the year we needed to build a national campaign of people calling for an open, transparent government everywhere across the country. We've known for months in fact, but honestly, we had no idea how people would respond when we put the word out. Now, only three weeks later, a few very big events have unfolded, and each new event has created new opportunities - as well as more need for our collective action than ever before. In other words, it's abundantly clear that we're on the right track.
Continue readingOGD: Commerce repackages old data and offers broken links
To comply with the Open Government Directive, the Commerce Department released four high value datasets that require considerable technical sophistication on the part of users--and patience. Some of the files are so large and cumbersome they're very difficult to open and use; others require a great deal of explanation--and you can currently only find those explanations by digging through the agency's site. Still other entries feature broken links or only contain a fraction of the information described on Data.gov. The Commerce Department says they're working on all of these problems, so hopefully we'll see an ...
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