White House publishes Open Data Policy memorandum on GitHub, enabling eParticipation

Among the interesting features of the White House’s new Open Data Policy is that the memorandum that provides policy guidance to agencies in complying with the policy (M-13-13) was published on GitHub, using GitHub’s “Pages” service — see the White House’s Project Open Data GitHub page.

Publishing the memorandum on GitHub allows citizens to propose revisions to the policy, through GitHub’s “commit” and “pull request” functions.

The White House’s publishing choice thus enables citizen participation in the process of crafting the government’s open data policy.

Nick Judd at TechPresident reports that developers have already begun to submit revisions to the policy on GitHub.

GitHub’s Ben Balter comments on this use of GitHub to enable citizen participation in policy making: The Revolution Will Be Forked.

HT Alan deLevie

Wilson: Interactive visualization of U.S. federal e-petitions

In November 2012 Chris Wilson of Yahoo News posted an interactive visualization of the e-petitions submitted on the U.S. federal government’s We the People e-petition site.

According to Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation, Wilson’s crawler for retrieving the petitions and their metadata is now part of the github.com/unitedstates/ project, specifically located at https://github.com/unitedstates/petitions

The github.com/unitedstates/ project is an open government data repository developed by Eric, Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack, and Derek Willis of The New York Times.

We the People is located at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/

For more information on the github.com/unitedstates/ project, click here and here.

HT @WHWeb

Glassmeyer: Free Law Users Group

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI has launched Free Law Users Group, on the pbworks platform.

Here is the description:

This group is for sharing news and developments in the Free Law world. Primarily it will serve as a conduit for connecting librarians to the law tech and developer communities, in the hope that librarians will be able to increase involvement and share their skills and knowledge. It is also hoped that individuals in the Free Law, Open Law and Open Gov developer worlds will join in and see that librarians aren’t so scary and can be a valuable resource in their projects.

This website is a wiki. Please feel free to add anything of relevance. It will really only succeed if the community takes charge of it. This also means it is a constant work in progress so check back often!

HT @sglassmeyer

On a related note:

Tim Stanley of Justia has started a new Free Law discussion group on Google+.

U.S. GPO releases House bills in bulk XML

Today the U.S. Government Printing Office has begun making U.S. House of Representatives’ legislative bills available for bulk download in XML, at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS

Currently, only bills from the current Congress are included.

The user guide provides more details about the data.

Click here for the GPO press release.

Click here for the Speaker’s office press release.

Release of the bills in bulk XML is a key goal of the #freeTHOMAS movement and a longstanding goal of the open government data community.

The House bills are the second major Congressional data set to be released in bulk XML this month; the first was the House floor proceedings in bulk XML.

Here are links to selected posts about the availability of this new legislative data set:

• Daniel Schuman: Access to Legislation Gets Better, Promise of More to Come
• Joshua Tauberer: On the new bulk bill XML from GPO
• Nick Judd: House Republicans Release More Data Catnip for Developers
• Alex Howard: Open data of U.S. House legislation now available in bulk format

Please see the comments to this post for links to additional resources about this issue.

New Congressional Data Available for Free Bulk Download: Bill Data 1973- , Members 1789-

Two new free and open sources of bulk data about the U.S. Congress have been created by Eric Mill of Sunlight Foundation, Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack, and Derek Willis of the New York Times, and posted on GitHub:

• Congressional bill data, 1973 to present, scraped from THOMAS
• “Every bill has a JSON file, data.json, with fields related to a bill’s ID, status, names, sponsorship, amendments, and history.”

• congress-legislators: Data about Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML:
• Data come from several sources. “Each legislator record is grouped into four guaranteed parts: id’s which relate the record to other databases, name information (first, last, etc.), biographical information (birthday, gender), and terms served in Congress.”

• congress scrapers:
• The code of the scrapers used to harvest the data.

HT @konklone: https://twitter.com/konklone/status/254239001840603136, https://twitter.com/konklone/status/254239600854306816, https://twitter.com/konklone/status/254239829104136192

Bruce, Mill, Schuman, Tauberer & Wonderlich: Recommendations on Public Access to Legislative Data

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute; Daniel Schuman, Eric Mill, and John Wonderlich, all of the Sunlight Foundation; and Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack and POPVOX, have posted a new report entitled On Public Access to Legislative Information: Recommendations to the Bulk Data Task Force (2012).

The report “provides a roadmap” that the U.S. Congress’s Bulk Data Task Force can use “to implement[]” free public “bulk access to” the THOMAS database of U.S. federal legislative information.

The report is a product of the effort — known as #freeTHOMAS — to provide free online public access in bulk to THOMAS.

For more information, please see Daniel’s post entitled How to #FreeTHOMAS: A report on implementing bulk access.

HT @danielschuman

Yu and Robinson on The Ambiguity of “Open Government”

Harlan Yu of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), and David G. Robinson of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School have published The New Ambiguity of “Open Government”, UCLA Law Review Discourse, 59, 178-208 (2012). Here is a summary:

The popular term “open government data” is, therefore, deeply ambiguous—it might mean either of two very different things. If “open government” is a phrase that modifies the noun “data,” we are talking about politically important disclosures, whether or not they are delivered by computer. On the other hand, if the words “open” and “government” are separate adjectives modifying “data,” we are talking about data that is both easily accessed and government related, but that might or might not be politically important. (Or the term might have a third meaning, as a shorthand reference to the intersection of data meeting both definitions: governmental data that is both politically sensitive and computer provided.)

In this Essay, we acknowledge that this ambiguity may sometimes be beneficial, but ultimately argue that the term “open government” has become too vague to be a useful label in most policy conversations. Open data can be a powerful force for public accountability—it can make existing information easier to analyze, process, and combine than ever before, allowing a new level of public scrutiny. At the same time, open data technologies can also enhance service delivery in any regime, even an opaque one. When policymakers and the public use the same term for both of these important benefits, governments may be able to take credit for increased public accountability simply by delivering open data technology.

In place of this confusion, we offer a stylized framework to consider each of these two questions independently. One dimension describes technology: How is the disclosed data structured, organized, and published? We describe the data itself as being on a spectrum between adaptable and inert, depending on how easy or hard it is for new actors to make innovative uses of the data. The other dimension describes the actual or anticipated benefits of the data disclosure; the goals of disclosure run on a spectrum between service delivery and public accounta­bility. This is admittedly a simplification of reality: In practice, many disclosures serve both objectives. However, it is common for one of the two motives to predominate over the other, and we believe this provides a useful starting point for thinking about the competing goals of disclosure.

The article discusses at length open legislative data.

Suhaka and Tauberer on Business Models for Reuse of Open Legislative Data

Karen Suhaka of LegiNation and Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack gave a “lightning talk” presentation entitled Legislative Transparency: A Round Up of Efforts and Results to Date (featuring this GoogleDoc spreadsheet on Open Gov Business Models) at IOGDC 2012 Virtual Conference: International Open Government Data Conference, 7 July 2012.

Part of the presentation concerned descriptions and examples of several different business models for using or reusing legislative and other government data. The legislative examples included:

• BillTrack50 (an example of the “Freemium” business model)
• GovTrack (“Advertising”)
• LexisNexis (“Pay services”)
• POPVOX (“Startup”)
• Sunlight Foundation (“Nonprofit”)
• THOMAS (“Government”)

The authors invite you to contribute additional business models and examples of use and reuse of open government data, to their GoogleDoc spreadsheet.

HT @Smoodle.

Google Endorses freeTHOMAS: Free Public Access to U.S. Federal Legislative Data in Bulk XML

Google has announced its support for Congress’s providing free public access in bulk XML to U.S. federal legislative data, in a new post by Seth Webb, Google’s Senior Policy Manager, entitled In Support of Legislative Transparency, on the Google Public Policy Blog.

The effort to persuade Congress to provide free public access to U.S. federal legislative data in bulk XML is popularly known as freeTHOMAS (hashtag #freeTHOMAS).

Mr. Webb writes:

We believe the ability to download bulk legislative data in formats like XML on a regular basis provides tremendous benefits. Website and app developers can use such data to provide up-to-date information on bills. Researchers can use it to perform studies. And politically-curious citizens can use it to follow legislation moving its way through Congress. [...] We applaud Congress for the work that it’s done to promote openness and look forward to a future of increased legislative transparency.

For more information, please see the complete post.

For more information about freeTHOMAS, please see Schuman: Major Transparency Milestone in Bulk Access Statement; the new post by David Moore of Participatory Politics Foundation entitled Next Steps in #freeTHOMAS Campaign; and Open Congress’s THOMAS bulk data access wiki.

HT @garvinfo

Tauberer, Bruce, and Schuman Quoted: Congressional Data May Soon Be Easier to Use Online

David A. Fahrenthold has published Congressional Data May Soon Be Easier to Use Online, Washington Post, June 8, 2012.

The article describes recent efforts to petition Congress to make U.S. federal legislative data — specifically the data underlying the THOMAS legislative information system — publicly available free of charge in bulk XML. Those efforts are popularly known as the freeTHOMAS movement (hashtag #freeTHOMAS).

The article contains quotations from Dr. Joshua Tauberer of Govtrack, Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute, and Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation.

For more information about freeTHOMAS, please see Schuman: Major Transparency Milestone in Bulk Access Statement; the new post by David Moore of Participatory Politics Foundation entitled Next Steps in #freeTHOMAS Campaign; and Open Congress’s THOMAS bulk data access wiki.