Misblog

Originally Published May 21, 2009; Last Updated April 14, 2010; Last Republished April 14, 2010:

The nascent website DataDotGov aims to facilitate easy access to the voluminous government data by centralized distribution. A quick test drive of the site indicate the site has some distance to travel both in terms of user interface and returned data sets.

Surely a search for "energy generating capacity" would want to return the Department of Energy, EIA Excel spreadsheet Monthly Nuclear Utility Generation by State and Reactor; www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_generation/usreact07.xls .

Instead it returns the mostly useless:

• Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) Files, Energy Consumption, 2005 - EIA
• Mineral Operations of Africa and the Middle East - USGS
• Mineral Operations of Latin America and Canada - USGS
• Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Observations (CoCoRaHS)
  - NWS

Still, the website is needed and has the potential of becoming useful and a great asset.

Res: Open The Government

Web:

• UPDATED 04/14/2010 Salon, FOIA in a Holder World: Cloudy with a chance of rain.

  Last week the Obama administration got mixed reviews on establishing transparency as the government's default option.

  Today Attorney General Holder was asked about his office’s unnecessary assertions of FOIA exemption—he'll check on it a get back to the questioner.

  Not surprisingly our government is having some difficulty amid great progress instilling transparency and openness into our secretive and often resistive bureaucracy.

  Keep at it; it gets easier once you get the hang of the transparency thing. As a bonus the bureaucrat's job gets easier and we get constantly improving government!

  Of course it can get nettlesome too. Our citizens begin arriving with maps of the restroom and instead of asking where the restroom is located, they ask if it wouldn't be better located on the first floor instead of the 19th.

• UPDATED 12/23/2009 OMB Watch, Transparency: Change You can Trust.

  OMB Watch summarizes the administration's 2009 efforts on: Open Government Vision; Nominees Boost Transparency Vision; Opening the White House; FOIA; State Secrets; Chemical Security; E-gov; Reforming Information Controls: CUI; Environmental and Public Health Data; Classification/Declassification; Data Gaps.

Blog:

• UPDATED 02/09/2010 White House, An Open Door to Open Government

• UPDATED 12/10/2009 White House, Why an Open Government Matters

  Our government's new motto must be:

  "The least secretive of nations is the strongest of nations."

• UPDATED 12/08/2009 ProPublica, White House Gives Agencies Transparency To-Do List

  The Obama administration is trying to change the government data disclosure default from opaque to transparent and has issued a directive¹—predictably there's a lot of agency inertia like holding opaque millions of historic and historical documents that are more than 25 years-old.

  ...so the Department of Justice (DOJ) held a closed training session for government employees on open-government.

• White House, Democratizing Data

-----notes-----

1. The directive requires each agency to periodically publish three high value data sets not previously published.

The directive does not require each agency to publish on DataDotGov the FOIA documents provided to any FOIA requester, but it should.

Then a FOIA requester can search DataDotGov before making their FOIA request. The search may obviate the request or may help the requester clarify their FOIA request.