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Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

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Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

#71

Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity. However, it needs to be not only "open", which typically means stashed away in some corner as a spreadsheet or database file, but accessible and useful to people. The UK has been pushing open data for years now and more and more institutions are now realizing this. Shameless plug for a research project that is aimin…

I actually rather have the raw data accessible instead of doctored version.

Why not both?

Make the raw data available for those of use who want to write machine-parsing algorithms, and also make it available in human-readable and easily digestible form for the broader public.

Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

#73

Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity. However, it needs to be not only "open", which typically means stashed away in some corner as a spreadsheet or database file, but accessible and useful to people. The UK has been pushing open data for years now and more and more institutions are now realizing this. Shameless plug for a research project that is aimin…

>Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity 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 inter…

Simply put, this government isn't ours. It belongs to the corporate heads and the monied elite and the lobbyists who write the laws that are uusually summarily passed by congress.

Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

#74
post #5

Open data is the first step. 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

It's worth noting that easy to access isn't always the best. A great example of this is mugshots, which are open data, but there are now websites that automatically scrape and index people's mugshots and use SEO to rank highly on searches. They then blackmail the person to have it removed.

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.

Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

#75
post #37

Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity. However, it needs to be not only "open", which typically means stashed away in some corner as a spreadsheet or database file, but accessible and useful to people. The UK has been pushing open data for years now and more and more institutions are now realizing this. Shameless plug for a research project that is aimin…

In case you haven't seen it, I think https://www.data.gov/ is an attempt to answer your point about making it "accessible and useful to people." There's room for improvement, but it's a start.

I thought there would be a flood of projects analysing the data when it came out, but it seems like the idea everyone applauded but not much came out of it. Steve Ballmer's http://usafacts.org seems like the first real attempt though.

Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

#76

Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity. However, it needs to be not only "open", which typically means stashed away in some corner as a spreadsheet or database file, but accessible and useful to people. The UK has been pushing open data for years now and more and more institutions are now realizing this. Shameless plug for a research project that is aimin…

> Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity. Out of curiosity, what’s the argument here for how public data being open by default is an important step toward fostering societal equity?

Here's a paper by the Sunlight Foundation that goes into this a bit:

https://www.scribd.com/doc/263776138/The-Social-Impact-of-Op...

Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

#77

Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity. However, it needs to be not only "open", which typically means stashed away in some corner as a spreadsheet or database file, but accessible and useful to people. The UK has been pushing open data for years now and more and more institutions are now realizing this. Shameless plug for a research project that is aimin…

The FAIR principles make a lot of sense to me: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible.

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

Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

#78
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced there are really any important national security secrets other than passcodes and so on. The rest seems to be excuses for hiding corruption of various kinds. Secrecy in government is incompatible with democracy by definition.

You have to think about how people respond to things. Social media in its current state has basically turned into a system that takes an event, removes all context, spins it in the most negative way imaginable, and then dogpiles on it to no end -- virtue signaling for imaginary points. There are often lots of things in government, and in life in general, where you must choose between two very negative choices. And th…

Khashoggi is obviously a canard; the Saudi Arabian government is currently running torture chambers in Yemen where they roast people alive[1]. The US has had no problem with this for years; we ourselves appointed a known torturer to head the CIA, the organization which is supposedly agog about Khashoggi's assassination. The CIA itself has been running an extrajudicial assassination program for over a decade now. Talk about "virtue signaling".

These people, the ones who are part of the security apparatus, are not in any position to make moral choices for the rest of us. They are highly immoral actors. I want to see them removed from government. The idea that they are capable of making good decisions in secret, without public input or oversight, is belied by the two decades of war, torture, assassination, and general chaos that they have actively fostered.

The problem, really, is that all of the secret policy conversations about Saudi Arabia have been about how to get them to continue buying weapons from American arms merchants, a policy greatly to the detriment of the American public, which would, in general, favor a policy more like: disengage from the Middle East, stop supporting torture, and transition away from fossil fuels. If we had spent $6 trillion on that instead of funding pointless wars and building up the Saudi torture state, we'd be much better off.

Let's stop having unaccountable, immoral people decide in secret what is good for America, and get back to letting the American public decide. We're better at it.

[1] https://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/inside-yemens-secr...

Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

#80

Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity. However, it needs to be not only "open", which typically means stashed away in some corner as a spreadsheet or database file, but accessible and useful to people. The UK has been pushing open data for years now and more and more institutions are now realizing this. Shameless plug for a research project that is aimin…

It would be extremely helpful if the government data used the same Solid protocol (Linked Data Platform) which will likely be getting widespread use starting next year. (See Tim Berner Lee's Inrupt.com Solid startup)
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