Does anyone know if this applies to PACER and its fees?
It does not. Only CFO Act agencies in the executive branch. But there is a bill to open up PACER.
Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
81–90 of 161 posts
Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
#82Can someone who is more familiar with the actual policy shed some light on this?
Do you have specific questions about the law that aren’t addressed here? https://e-pluribusunum.org/2018/12/20/senate-passes-evidence...
Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
#83Can someone who is more familiar with the actual policy shed some light on this?
FWIW, the author, Alex Howard (who I'm friends-via-Twitter with), is as familiar with this as anyone. He was previously a senior analyst at the Sunlight Foundation, which is a prominent open-government organization: https://sunlightfoundation.com/author/ahoward/ 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 U…
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Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
#84Making 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.
data.gov is great but it seems like the most recent activities/updates were prior to 2016...
Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
#85As a next step I would love to see an exploration of a legal system where a change of a law or regulation is backed by both data (data and methodology directly referenced by the law) and a description of the expected impact. Something such as:
> 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 :)
Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
#86What type of policy implications does this actually have?
Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
You obviously did not read the article. > public information should be open by default to the public in a machine-readable format, where such publication doesn’t harm privacy or security
Scanned pdf of a spreadsheet is clearly machine-readable, as you can read this document with your computer.
I'm pretty sure that isn't what machine-readable means, especially in this context. But this kind of obtuse reading seems like it would be exactly how the concern of the parent comment would come into being.
Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 this: "buying weapons from American arms merchants, a policy greatly to the detriment of the American public"
American arms merchants employ the American public. People get jobs. Taxes are paid. Suppliers and subcontractors benefit too.
A detriment would be if Saudi Arabia bought from China or Russia, enriching people in those nations instead of the American public. We'd also have far less influence over Saudi Arabia... really, they could be a lot worse.
Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
#89It's good to see the US govt making an effort to step up its technical level. A vast if hidden problem in the political sphere is that most politicians do not have a technical education. This creates a serious misconfiguration of the govt alongside other centers of soft power like large cap tech companies.
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.
Re: Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
#90Making 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 prefer when it is available as a spreadsheet or database file. The crucial element is my having access to the data. After that, any differential amount of information I have over everyone else is an improvement.
For instance, consider the statistics on accidents between cars and bikes in California. You can get the numbers yourself from the government. When someone says that more accidents are adjudged to be because the bicyclist is at fault, you can reference the truth and ruin the credibility of the person making the assertion, thereby allowing political advancement of your own cause. No one can use the technique against you because you are capable of acquiring the knowledge and won't make wrong assertions. Only other people will make them.
Having verifiable true information over someone is power. It's better non-democratized so long as I fall within the circle of power.