It’s exciting times right now in the government transparency community. Alan deLevie posted this very thorough summary of the recently released Open Data Policy, and it’s reception across the community, in Robert Richard’s wonderful Legal Informatics Research Network google group. I’ve pasted the whole thing below for your enjoyment.
Written by Alan deLevie:
Today the White House released its Open Data Policy. Excerpt:
Pursuant to the Executive Order of May 9, 2013, Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information, this Memorandum establishes a framework to help institutionalize the principles of effective information management at each stage of the information’s life cycle to promote interoperability and openness. Whether or not particular information can be made public, agencies can apply this framework to all information resources to promote efficiency and produce value.
By requiring agencies to publicly list all their data that could be made public, the President is not just reaffirming that decisions about disclosure should be based on the public interest, he’s also giving the public (and Congress) tools to enforce them. When open data procedures are incorporated into agency processes from the start, we’ll start to see more systems designed for bulk access from the start, and we’ll be better able to recoup all the missed opportunities in legacy datasets that are still closed. We’ll be able to evaluate agencies’ transparency against what they’ve defined as their candidates for release, and clearly identify areas where agencies avoid disclosure altogether.
TL:DR: The new E.O. and memorandum are good for transparency and lock in almost all of the generally accepted notions of open government data. But it misses the mark on the requirement of “open licenses.”
Mosaic Effect: The Mosaic Effect occurs when the information in an individual dataset, in isolation, may not pose a risk of identifying an individual (or threatening some other important interest such as security), but when combined with other available information, could pose such risk. Before disclosing potential PII or other potentially sensitive information, agencies must consider other publicly available data – in any medium and from any source – to determine whether some combination of existing data and the data intended to be publicly released could allow for the identification of an individual or pose another security concern. [source]
Millions of people around the world use GitHub every day to build software together, but the GitHub Way™ isn’t limited to code.
We are humbled to see that the White House drafted and released the official Open Data Policy of the United States on GitHub! The Presidential Memorandum calls for the creation of the aptly named Project Open Data, with the goal of making government data “available, discoverable, and usable – in a word, open”.
Today’s news marks the first time a government entity has published law as a living, collaborative document. We’re excited to see how the Open Data Policy evolves with the input of the community, and we hope this is just the first of many.
By choosing GitHub Pages, government employees as well as citizens are empowered to continuously propose and discuss potential improvements, creating a living policy document to “unlock the potential of government data”.
Civic hackers and public servants at all levels are using GitHub to collaborate on everything from information about elected officials to the location of the nearest bike rack. While adding a [thumbs up] to a pull request isn’t going to replace ballots at your local polling place any time soon, one thing’s for sure: the revolution is only just beginning.
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