The federal government has an incredible trove of data on local government financial performance. This collection of 18,000 annual audits can tell researchers an enormous amount about local government financial conditions and about how these agencies spend federal grants.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Hartford’s new open data portal
It'll take a long time to address the challenges that face Hartford and other small, post-industrial cities. But open data is one small way to enable progress and Hartford recently joined the ranks of cities with open data portals.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Mapping city boundary change over time with open data
MapStory.org, a Sunlight Foundation OpenGov grantee, has successfully collected, processed and mapped nearly every municipal annexation to occur in the state of New York since 1625 and made the data available on StoryLayers in their site.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Tools and NGO collaboration push Georgia to redefine “FOI as usual”
Four citizen groups in Georgia are promoting a new level of transparency by uniting their freedom of information efforts in a single website called OpenData.ge.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Visualizing the U.S. budget and other civic tools
Data is only useful when people who need it can use it to make decisions. Making data transparent means not just releasing it to the public, but giving the public tools to understand it.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Improving communication between politicians and citizens
Freagle is a virtual town square that combines social networking, big data and analytics technologies to reconnect voters and political leaders.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: How open is your city’s crime data?
SpotCrime ranks US cities on a scale of 0 to 2 on how open and transparent their police agencies are with crime data. A 2 ranking means the city is open with its data, a 0 means it’s not.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: How Datasembly plans to make open data more discoverable and usable
The increase of the availability of open data should make it easier for analysts to solve problems and have better insight into the actions of the government. Datasembly is helping by making open data more discoverable and usable.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Philadelphia’s open data program
Governments that make an investment in releasing data that allows outsiders to ask tough questions are sending a clear signal to prospective data users that they are serious, that the foundations of data sharing are solid.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: To be or not to be — Democracy in Fiji 2014?
In just over a month, Fijians will go to the polls in a historic multi-party parliamentary election. Here is a look at the radical increases in regulations of the country's political finance.
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