121–130 of 161 posts
With all the problems its government has, united states is still at it fostering innovation. Open data will bring innovation and accountability. Great move
Innovation? Other nations (like Sweden) have had its data public for many decades now.
I am saying by opening data, us will be fostering innovation.
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Innovation? Other nations (like Sweden) have had its data public for many decades now.
UK is another great example. There is no "innovation" going on here. It is the data owned by the citizens, doesn't take that much effort to release it - they are collecting the data anyway, all they have to do is make it available to the general public. Still, a step in the right direction
US government has much more room for improvement (because of its complex structure (federal vs state agencies, etc), large population and so on) - This is very different from pretty much the rest of the world.
With all the problems its government has, united states is still at it fostering innovation. Open data will bring innovation and accountability. Great move
> federal agencies should use evidence when they make public policy 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
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Do you have any tool suggestions or general advice for someone trying to do this? A while back I was trying to extract text from some government PDFs in order to make the information more accessible for others, but I became a bit overwhelmed when I started reading up on PDFs.
Sure! In terms of raw text extraction (for documents that don't require OCR), the most useful tools I've worked with have been pdftotext [0] and PyMuPDF [1]. For extracting useful details, really, my best advice is to make sure that your regex skills are sharp. I've been meaning to explore the possibility of using NLP tools for named entity recognition, but unfortunately I don't have much of a background there. The r…
All I want for this Christmass is an authoritative list of all US federal agencies. I kid you not, there is no such list and the number of federal agencies is uncertain. From Wikipedia: >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 exec…
Interesting that the Federal Reserve was exempted from this legislation.
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…
Ideally, I'd prefer the data be free, but if the fee was (mostly) nominal, I'd consider that almost as good...
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> 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...
It's a link to a site that wants you to agree to try a monthly subscription before you can download anything at all.
Especially in the context of a discussion about public data, that's an important distinction.
If you can, please provide an URL to the actual content?
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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.