Today Representative Steve Israel introduced the Public Online Information Act calling for government to:

1. Create an expert committee for all three branches of government to steer government towards making datasets publicly available in meaningful ways.

2. Direct the executive branch to consider guidelines issued by that committee and for the CIOs of various agencies to do the same thing, and

3. Place online all publicly available government documents and data held by the executive branch. This includes everything they've got, with a few potential exceptions: classified information, personnel rules, trade secrets, "priviliged inter/intra agency memos", information affecting an individuals privacy, law enforcement records, records of financial institutions, and most importantly, geographical information concerning wells. Those are the same exceptions as in FOIA.