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Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies

63 points by xPaw 13y ago

bane 13y ago
Something I've been continuously impressed with is the incredible amount of highly detailed data the U.S. government collects on just about everything. I don't mean spooky scary intelligence data, but more mundane things like the Census and Geospatial data. If you dig long enough you can find data on almost anything. I think France does something similar, and I've been impressed with the few bits of data that I've seen from the U.K. (but some of it is stuck behind weird trademark laws or something). But I'm largely lost behind language barriers in finding this out for other countries. What other countries do this?
- malandrew 13y ago
  More than you would imagine. The problem has always been awareness, access, noise and definitions. Most people aren't aware data relevant to them is collected and when they discover data they want, it's in a format that is difficult to use or full of noise. And even if you get clean data in a format you want, it can be hard to find official definitions and criteria describing the data, so it's not uncommon for two agencies to appear to collect the same data, but it's not really the same data because those agencies are working under their own varied definition or criteria. When I worked as a financial analyst in Brazil, I was amazed at the data that was available from IBGE and various other governmental agencies. Despite the availability of data, it was rarely in a format that was useful without constantly having to writing a special scraper/parser. And even then the same type of data was inconsistent between sources.
duggieawesome 13y ago
The app Project Open Data will be able to: Read your public information. Update your user profile. Update your public and private repositories (Commits, Issues, etc). Create and edit gists.
- lallysingh 13y ago
  Meh. Just go here https://github.com/project-open-data/project-open-data.github.io https://github.com/project-open-data/project-open-data.githu... instead.
pwang 13y ago
The schema.md they link to currently leads to a 404...
BrianEatWorld 13y ago
1.e. No PDFs.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
glitchdout 13y ago
Wow, a tremendous step towards transparency. Wish my country did this, but one can dream... The site is just gorgeous (http://project-open-data.github.io/ http://project-open-data.github.io/). And most important of all, editing the content is really easy (although you need a GitHub account for that). I'll have to check out the GitHub editor they are using. Published law as a living, collaborative document. This is the future! Edit: Hmm, why is it that in my RSS feed the submission link goes to https://github.com/blog/1499-the-revolution-will-be-forked https://github.com/blog/1499-the-revolution-will-be-forked and here it goes to a random page on the open-data site?

63 points by xPaw 13y ago

bane 13y ago

Something I've been continuously impressed with is the incredible amount of highly detailed data the U.S. government collects on just about everything. I don't mean spooky scary intelligence data, but more mundane things like the Census and Geospatial data. If you dig long enough you can find data on almost anything. I think France does something similar, and I've been impressed with the few bits of data that I've seen from the U.K. (but some of it is stuck behind weird trademark laws or something). But I'm largely lost behind language barriers in finding this out for other countries. What other countries do this?

malandrew 13y ago
More than you would imagine. The problem has always been awareness, access, noise and definitions. Most people aren't aware data relevant to them is collected and when they discover data they want, it's in a format that is difficult to use or full of noise. And even if you get clean data in a format you want, it can be hard to find official definitions and criteria describing the data, so it's not uncommon for two agencies to appear to collect the same data, but it's not really the same data because those agencies are working under their own varied definition or criteria. When I worked as a financial analyst in Brazil, I was amazed at the data that was available from IBGE and various other governmental agencies. Despite the availability of data, it was rarely in a format that was useful without constantly having to writing a special scraper/parser. And even then the same type of data was inconsistent between sources.

duggieawesome 13y ago

The app Project Open Data will be able to: Read your public information. Update your user profile. Update your public and private repositories (Commits, Issues, etc). Create and edit gists.

lallysingh 13y ago
Meh. Just go here https://github.com/project-open-data/project-open-data.github.io https://github.com/project-open-data/project-open-data.githu... instead.

pwang 13y ago

The schema.md they link to currently leads to a 404...

BrianEatWorld 13y ago

1.e. No PDFs.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

glitchdout 13y ago

Wow, a tremendous step towards transparency. Wish my country did this, but one can dream... The site is just gorgeous (http://project-open-data.github.io/ http://project-open-data.github.io/). And most important of all, editing the content is really easy (although you need a GitHub account for that). I'll have to check out the GitHub editor they are using. Published law as a living, collaborative document. This is the future! Edit: Hmm, why is it that in my RSS feed the submission link goes to https://github.com/blog/1499-the-revolution-will-be-forked https://github.com/blog/1499-the-revolution-will-be-forked and here it goes to a random page on the open-data site?