Show Us the Data!
February 11th, 2009 by Heather West
Today, CDT and OpenTheGovernment.org launched Show Us The Data: Most Wanted Federal Government Documents, a website created with lots of help from our friends at Sunlight Labs. CDT and OpenTheGovernment.org are setting out to identify the ten most wanted government documents, reports or data sets that should be on the Web – but are missing because the government hasn’t put them on the Internet.
In the last ten years, the Internet has come a long way- just check out the website for our first Ten Most Wanted survey. The federal government has made great progress in their use of the Internet too, but we know that they still aren’t putting the information that we want online as proactively and as usably as we would like. Last year, we talked about how hard it can be to find government information through search.
We’re hoping that you, as part of the open government community, can help us make a list of the unclassified information that you’d like access to online. We want to know about documents, data sets, databases, and raw information that you can’t find or you can’t use the way you’d like to, and what the government could do to make it easier. The Internet offers an easy way to distribute public information- for free, and in open formats. The data could be used by interested third parties to make incredible mashups and use the information in ways that the government doesn’t.
To bring pressure to bear on the government to make better use of the Internet, CDT and OpenTheGovernment.org are asking for information that would significantly benefit researchers, reporters, communities and individuals- but that isn’t online. Send us your nomination: a report written by a federal agency, maps or data sets created through government research projects, or judicial decisions and court proceedings that are available on paper but not online.
What you can do: Check out Show Us The Data, and vote on your Most Wanted document- or nominate a new one! We’re taking nominations and votes until March 9th, 2009.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 3:27 pm and is filed under CDT, Open Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 12th, 2009 at 12:50 am
The two documents I’m most interested in are the ACTA and where the bailout money is really going. The ACTA is important because it’s hard to build a movement against it when you don’t know what you’re angry about. From the little that has been leaked on Wikileaks, the ACTA sounds really bad for consumers and internet users (though I’m sure copyright holders can’t wait). Why trade agreements in general are written in secret is tragically anti-Democratic.
Though beyond just releasing documents, I want the government to provide functional data. When government reports are released, provide APIs or, at least, spreadsheets that third-parties can easily input to create their own APIs. The UK government has already been experimenting with this.
I also love Govtrack.us which tracks full bills, changes to them, and voting records. It’s beneficial to have a third-party track votes and changes to bills just in case someone in the government wants to hide their vote (which, apparently, many do). But it’s not just about more information. It’s also about smarter information.