I wish I could do more business with my gov't (State and Local) through the internet.

"Copies of documents cannot be ordered through this website, by email or over the telephone." Only fax and snail mail... https://www.dos.ny.gov/corps/faq_copies.page.asp

Does that mean they won't open data that affects monetary policy or that they will only open data that affects monetary policy?

Either way that seems huge.

The biggest problem with this terrible binary format is that metadata can leak a great deal that should have not been released. So this leads to PDF output of word/excel.

The next area is that especially local government offices have no way of setting up a data portal. I'm working on this right now, where the only way to get data out of Bloomington,IN is to do FOIA requests every week/month over the data you want. This absolutely should be available via a portal, and not locked behind "in person, mail, fax at cost of .10$ a page".

Open data will bring innovation and accountability.

Great move

> By changing law A related to B, we expect the increase of C to be at least D in the next E months.

If not achieved, the change is reversed/reduced. Hopefully that would allow experimentation without taking the risk of creating a system too bad in case the implementation or policy isn’t good enough.

Just dreaming here :)

There is no way around it that these companies have to work with the government to secure public interests from 21st century threats. Just today I read an article about how black hat hackers are targeting outdated industrial control systems more vigorously than ever before. The government on its own without technical upgrades cannot face down this problem in its current condition. Which is why opening up data is a beneficial thing.

Openness of data is a double edged sword. It will make malicious agents' job easier to have as much data as possible in a consistently machine readable format, but it will also help those on the other side.

If tech is one of the things that can bolster and improve government, tech needs to work in the optimal environment. Which is one with open data.

>Legislative definitions of a federal agency are varied, and even contradictory, and the official United States Government Manual offers no definition. While the Administrative Procedure Act definition of "agency" applies to most executive branch agencies, Congress may define an agency however it chooses in enabling legislation, and subsequent litigation, often involving the Freedom of Information Act and the Government in the Sunshine Act. These further cloud attempts to enumerate a list of agencies.

Please, could we end this obsession with backronyms in congress. Perhaps some congressperson could create a suitably titled backronym act to rid us of backronym acts. This should just be the one singular "Government Data Act" and it should be amended as needed to cover any law changes around "Government Data".

It makes legislation easier to access. And eventually easier to engage with.

Some personal favorites among BigQuery public datasets include NOAA GHCN[0], the Census Bureau's Zip Code Tabulation Area [1], and FEC Campaign Finance [2].

[0] https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/noaa-pu... [1] https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/bigquer... [2] https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/bigquer...

public information should be open by default to the public in a machine-readable format, where such publication doesn’t harm privacy or security federal agencies should use evidence when they make public policy

The word “should” is used in both one and two. If my time in the government taught me anything, it’s that “should” is only slightly stronger than “may”. If an instruction says “shall”, then it is required to be done.

If you're interested in informing the public on legislation, have experience on the hill or UI/UX experience hit me up. I'm just some dude with an idea who lives in a terminal. Money is secondary.

All I want for Christmas: accountability for the DoD budget, which for 2019 will be $717 Billion, the majority of the USG's discretionary spending.

In 2015, an audit of the budget revealed $125 Billion in wasteful spending, and this was covered up. In 2016, the Office of Inspector General for DoD said that the Army made 6.5 Trillion in wrongful adjustments to its 2015 accounting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...

We still do not know how many contractors the DOD employs, or how much money they are paid, because the numbers are just not recorded. We do know, though, that the numbers and budgets we do have are often inaccurately reported, according to the DOD OIG.

People whine a lot about paying taxes, but the politicians that always complain about taxes are extracting record amounts of tax money for a military that is mismanaged, doesn't do its accounting properly, can't build modern fighting vehicles, and doesn't record basic information like how many people they employ.

The submitted post includes a link [0] to an article he wrote a couple days back, which provides more context on "How did open government data get into the US Code?", including the nitty-gritty of how the original bill was proposed in the last session but ultimately left out of legislation. Howard writes that the legislation was "one of the primary legislative priorities for me during my years as a senior analyst and then deputy director at the Sunlight Foundation"

[0] https://e-pluribusunum.org/2018/12/20/senate-passes-evidence...

Of course, there are exceptions: the PDFs that are often provided by the prosecution as part of the discovery process are prohibitively difficult to deal with, and should be considered a violation of Brady vs. Maryland, IMO.

the cynic in me just figures that this moves the goal post such that special interest groups will adapt to produce the right evidence for the desired outcomes

I think this was one of my biggest shocks doing work for the government, collecting public data, payed by tax funded grants. Public data isn't for the public.

We went into this project with all these starry eyed dreams of making a public online database and freely posting everything we collected, with maps and interactive tools, status reports. It was part of our grant proposal.

Then reality came and we found out public data meant a government password protected database with access fees where our data would be available to people willing to pay for it or we'd lose our funding. The data were for companies or individuals willing to pay the government not for the public.

This still doesn't sit well with me nearly 6 years later. That was never what we wanted out of that project and it wasn't what was planned or accepted when we wrote our proposal.

But I'll be the first to admit I know very little about how the Federal Reserve works.

As long as the data is accessible and reasonable easy to get, where journalists and data scientists who really care about the data can get it, then I think we're in a good place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_data

1. public information should be open by default to the public in a machine-readable format, where such publication doesn’t harm privacy or security

I'm sure literally everything that they wish to keep opaque will declared to be covered under one or both of these incredibly vague categories and nothing will significantly change. Is there any elaboration in the bill that defines what they can call a matter of privacy or security? Even if there is, it wouldn't matter much because how are people going to tell if they keep it locked down in the first place? And they would not risk any sort of real blowback for abusing this and getting caught. Tell me there have not been far, far worse scandals that resulted in no consequences for the perps and cowed silence from the public. I don't think they're hiding the X-Files in there or anything, but this won't magically cause a more transparent, just, or equitable government unless it has serious teeth and tight language.

And 2. federal agencies should use evidence when they make public policy

Somehow I wonder if the data from the Kansas experiment will be taken into consideration and turned into public policy by this current administration, or if they will cherry-pick evidence selectively to justify only wildly unpopular legislation because someone (possibly an industry with a conflict of interest?) contrives some p-hacked research to back it up. Just because something is scientific doesn't necessarily mean it's good government. It is often so, but I'm always very wary when they trot out a bill with lots of bold language touting justice and democracy, truth, stuff like that. If the US legislature passes a bill called "protect innocent puppies from being kicked in the name of god and freedom" you can be 95% sure that this bill will enable a great wave of puppy-kicking despite its holy name.

Since every law is a trade-off, having both positive and negative effects, I wish each law would enumerate the expected/possible positive and negative effects. In other words, I want the trade-off to be explicit and for the lawmakers to express why they believe the positive effects outweigh the negatives ones.

It's almost like they want to cover up the systemic disempowerment of the American electorate.

(struggled with the NYM so gave up and went with something childish...)

Despite all that, the Federal Reserve is not a government institution, so such legislation would be similar to singling out your business to post all information in machine readable format online.