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 readingIntroducing Sunlight Live
Today we're going to take our version of live political coverage to the next level by beginning to connect government data such as campaign contributions or lobbyist meetings to a political event in real-time.
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 ...
Continue readingData Quality Deserves to be Tackled on Its Own
Last week Clay wrote about how we'll be evaluating /open pages released under the OGD. The post ended with a series of considerations that we think are important: completeness, primacy, timeliness, accessibility, machine readability, availability without registration, being non-proprietary, freedom from licensing restrictions, permanence and obtainability.
One thing is conspicuously missing from the list, though: quality.
Continue readingOGD: Defense releases what it already releases
To comply with the Open Government Directive, the Defense Department designated three high-value datasets last week, among them a listing of those requesting more transparency from the Pentagon. DoD released details on the 4,000 Freedom of Information requests it has received as well as datasets with information on service members gender and race, U.S. state, and marriage statistics.
Interestingly, the three datasets that Defense said were its high value releases, fulfilling a requirement of the first stage of the directive, were not marked as agency-reported high-value dataset (with an asterisk) on Data.gov. This seems like a small ...
Surveying the first fruits of the open government directive
We're still surveying those high value data sets released as part of the open government directive--there are hundreds of files to sift through, which is obviously a good thing. But while we don't have a final analysis done, a few trends are becoming apparent.
The high value data sets consist, overwhelmingly, of information that's already been released elsewhere. In many cases, at least in the raw data catalog, the information is provided as, well, raw data. For example, the Dept. of Transportation released its Uniform Tire Quality Grading System, which provides various ratings on the durability ...
Open Gov’t Directive: large data set release today
This evening, the White House issued a press release (included below) touting the release of nearly 300 data sets from... View Article
Continue readingOGD: Justice
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