Author Archives: Alex

Digging in open data dirt, Climate Corporation finds nearly $1 billion in acquisition

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“Like the weather information, the data on soils was free for the taking. The hard and expensive part is turning the data into a product.”-Quentin Hardy, in 2011, in a blog post about “big data in the dirt.”

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The Climate Corporation, acquired by Monsanto for $930 million dollars on Wednesday, was founded using 30 years of government data from the National Weather Service, 60 years of crop yield data and 14 terabytes of information on soil types for every two square miles for the United States from the Department of Agriculture, per David Friedberg, chief executive of the Climate Corporation.

Howsabout that for government “data as infrastructure” and platform for businesses?

As it happens, not everyone is thrilled to hear about that angle or the acquirer. At VentureBeat, Rebecca Grant takes the opportunity to knock “the world’s most evil corporation for the effects of Monsanto’s genetically modified crops, and, writing for Salon, Andrew Leonard takes the position that the Climate Corporation’s use of government data constitutes a huge “taxpayer ripoff.”

Most observers, however, are more bullish. Hamish MacKenzie hails the acquisition as confirmation that “software is eating the world,” signifying an inflection point in data analysis transforming industries far away from Silicon Valley. Liz Gannes also highlighted the application of data-driven analysis to an offline industry. Ashlee Vance focused on the value of Climate Corporation’s approach to scoring risk for insurance in agribusiness. Stacey Higginbotham posits that the acquisition could be a boon to startups that specialize in creating data on soil and climate through sensors.

[Image Credit: Climate Corporation, via NPR]

City of Los Angeles launches open data pilot and survey

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Upon election, I wondered whether Mayor-Elect Eric Garcetti would reboot Los Angeles city government for the 21st century. After 4 months, there are several promising green shoots to report.

First, Mayor Garcetti vowed to modernize city government in the City of Angels, posting agency performance statistics online and reviewing all departments. Now, the City of Los Angeles has launched its own open data pilot project using ESRI’s ArcGIS platform.

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For veterans of such efforts, a portal to mapping data may not be particularly exciting or useful, but it’s a start. Notably, the city has put up an online survey where people can request other kind of city data and suggest changes or improvements to the pilot website.

Here’s a few suggestions:

1) Study how the cities of Chicago and New York cleaned, published and used data, including market demand.

2) Talk to the data desk at the Los Angeles Times. If you want your city’s performance data to be used by media for accountability and transparency, address their concerns.

3) Make a list of every single request for data made by journalists in Los Angeles under the California Records ActRelease the data and proactively publish that type of data going forward.

4) If your goal is economic outcomes from open data, review all requests for city data from businesses and prioritize release of those data sets. Engage startups and venture capitalists who are consuming open data and ask about quality, formats and frequency of release.

5) Check out New York City’s gorgeous new open data site and the ongoing release of more data sets. Set those free, too.

6) Check out the new NYC.gov, Utah.gov and gov.uk in the United Kingdom for ideas, principles and models. Of note: the use of open standards, citizen-centricity, adaptive Web design, powerful search, focus on modern design aesthetic.

Good luck, LA!

Does privatizing government services require FOIA reform to sustain open government?

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I read an editorial on “open government” in the United Kingdom by Nick Cohen today, in which he argues that Prime Minister David Cameron is taking “Britain from daylight into darkness. Cohen connects privatization to the rise of corporate secrecy … Continue reading →

Hedge fund use of government data for business intelligence shows where the value is

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money vortexThis week, I read and shared a notable Wall Street Journal article on the value of government data in that bears highlighting: hedge funds are paying for market intelligence using open government laws as an acquisition vehicle.

Here’s a key excerpt from the story: “Finance professionals have been pulling every lever they can these days to extract information from the government. Many have discovered that the biggest lever of all is the one available to everyone—the Freedom of Information Act—conceived by advocates of open government to shine light on how officials make decisions. FOIA is part of an array of techniques sophisticated investors are using to try to obtain potentially market-moving information about products, legislation, regulation and government economic statistics.”

What’s left unclear by the reporting here is if there’s 1) strong interest in data and 2) deep pocketed hedge funds or well-financed startups are paying for it, why aren’t agencies releasing it proactively?

Notably, the relevant law provides for this, as the WSJ reported:

“The only way investors can get most reports is to send an open-records request to the FDA. Under a 1996 law, when the agency gets frequent requests for the same records—generally more than three—it has to make them public on its website. But there isn’t any specific deadline for doing so, says Christopher Kelly, an FDA spokesman. That means first requesters can get records days or even months before they are posted online.”

Tracking inbound FOIA requests from industry and responding to this market indicator as a means of valuing  “high value data” is a strategy that has been glaringly obvious for years. Unfortunately, it’s an area in which the Obama administration’s open data policies look to have failed over the last 4 years, at least as viewed through the prism of this article.

If data sets that are requested multiple times are not being proactively posted on Data.gov and tracked there, there’s a disconnect between what the market for government data is and the perception by officials. As the Obama administration and agencies prepare to roll out enterprise data inventories later fall as part of the open data policies, here’s hoping agency CIOs are also taking steps to track who’s paying for data and which data sets are requested.

If one of the express goals of the federal governments is to find an economic return on investment on data releases, agencies should focus on open data with business value. It’s just common sense.

[Image Credit: Open Knowledge Foundation, Follow the Money]

White House asks for feedback on second National Action Plan for Open Government

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As the annual Open Government Partnership conference draws near, the White House would like the people to weigh in on building a more open government. The request for feedback parallels the one made two years ago, when the White House engaged civil society organizations regarding its open government efforts, and follows up on a July 3 post on open government on the White House blog.

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Here are the questions that they’d like help answering:

  1. How can we better encourage and enable the public to participate in government and increase public integrity? For example, in the first National Action Plan, we required Federal enforcement agencies to make publicly available compliance information easily accessible, downloadable and searchable online – helping the public to hold the government and regulated entities accountable.
  • What other kinds of government information should be made more available to help inform decisions in your communities or in your lives?
  • How would you like to be able to interact with Federal agencies making decisions which impact where you live?
  • How can the Federal government better ensure broad feedback and public participation when considering a new policy?
  1. The American people must be able to trust that their Government is doing everything in its power to stop wasteful practices and earn a high return on every tax dollar that is spent.  How can the government better manage public resources? 
  • What suggestions do you have to help the government achieve savings while also improving the way that government operates?
  • What suggestions do you have to improve transparency in government spending?
  1. The American people deserve a Government that is responsive to their needs, makes information readily accessible, and leverages Federal resources to help foster innovation both in the public and private sector.   How can the government more effectively work in collaboration with the public to improve services?
  • What are your suggestions for ways the government can better serve you when you are seeking information or help in trying to receive benefits?
  • In the past few years, the government has promoted the use of “grand challenges,” ambitious yet achievable goals to solve problems of national priority, and incentive prizes, where the government identifies challenging problems and provides prizes and awards to the best solutions submitted by the public.  Are there areas of public services that you think could be especially benefited by a grand challenge or incentive prize?
  • What information or data could the government make more accessible to help you start or improve your business?

The White House is asking that feedback be sent to opengov@ostp.gov by September 23 and states that it will post a summary of submissions online in the future.

If you’re in the mood to weigh in, there just might be a few other pressing issues that deserve to be addressed in the plan, from compliance with the Freedom of Information Act to press freedom to surveillance and national security.

A note on email, public engagement and transparency

In a post regarding the White House’s call for input, Nextgov reporter Joseph Marks is skeptical about using email to solicit feedback, suggesting instead that the administration return to the approach of 2009, when the transition team asked the public at large to weigh in on open government.

“When seeking advice on open government, it seems natural to make that advice itself open and transparent,” writes Marks. “This could be done using a plain old comments section. Even better, the White House could have engaged the public with a crowdsourcing platform such as IdeaScale, which allows users to vote ideas up and down. That way the public could participate not just in offering ideas but in choosing which ones merit further consideration.”

People who have been following the thread around the drafting of the U.S. “national action plans” for open government know, however, that a similar call for feedback went out two years ago, when the White House asked for comments on the first version of the plan. At the time, I was similarly skeptical of using email as a mechanism for feedback.

Writing on Google+, however, open government researcher Tiago Peixto, however, posited some reasons to look at email in a different light:

My first reaction was similar to that of some other observers: e-mail consultations, in most cases, are not transparent (at least immediately) and do not foster any kind of collaboration/deliberation.

But this comes rather as a surprise. Even though Sunstein might have some reserves towards deliberative models he is a major scholar in the field of decision-making and – to put it in fashionable terms – solutions to tap the crowd’s expertise. In fact, judging from this, one might even expect that Sunstein would take the opportunity offered by the OGP to create some sort of “prediction market”, one of his favorite mechanisms to leverage the knowledge dispersed across the public. In this case, why would they solicit online feedback via e-mail?

Thinking of email as a practical, last-minute choice is a possible explanation. But in the spirit of open interpretation (nowadays everything needs to be preceded by the word “open”), I am thinking of an alternative scenario that may have led to the choice of e-mail as the channel to gather input from the public online:

A possible hypothesis is that Sunstein might have been confronted by something that is no news to federal government employees: they have a very limited number of tools that they are actually allowed to use in order to engage with the public online. Having a limited number of options is not a bad thing per se, provided the options available are good enough. In this sense, the problem is that most of the tools available (e.g. ranking, ideation) do not meet reasonable standards of good “choice architecture”, to use Sunstein’s terms. One might imagine that as Sunstein went through the different options available, he foresaw all the effects that could be generated by the tools and their design: reputational cascades, polarization, herding… In the end, the only remaining alternative, although unexciting, was e-mail. In this case at least, preferences are independently aggregated, and the risks of informational and social influence are mitigated.

Maybe the option of using e-mail to solicit inputs from the public was just a practical solution. But thinking twice, given the options out there, I guess I would have opted for e-mail myself.

From where I sit today, the White House might be better off trying a both/and strategy: solicit feedback via email, but also post the draft action plan to Github, just like the open data policy, and invite the public to comment on proposals and add new ones.

The lack of public engagement around the plan on the primary White House Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts, however, along with the rest of the administration’s social media channels, suggests that feedback on this plan may not a top priority at the moment. To date, federal agencies are not using social media to ask for feedback either, including the Justice Department, which plays an important role in Freedom of Information Act policy and requests.

At least they’re using the @OpenGov and @WhiteHouseOSTP accounts:

 

Should Congress criminalize online “revenge pornography”?

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1-Blind-JusticeAShould “revenge porn” be made a crime? In California, revenge porn could soon be illegal.

This weekend, in an op-ed for CNN.com, University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron argues that Congress and other states in the union also should move to criminalize sharing nude pictures of a person without that person’s consent.

“New Jersey is the only state to make it a felony to disclose a person’s nude or partially nude images without that person’s consent,” she writes. “The New Jersey statute is a helpful model for states like California that are considering proposals to criminalize revenge porn. Congress should amend the federal cyberstalking law, 18 U.S.C. § 2261A, to cover the use of any interactive computer service to produce or disclose a sexually graphic visual depiction of an individual without that individual’s consent.”

Citron argues that that, given the profound effects upon someone’s personal and professional life in the schools, workplaces and communities they inhabit “offline,” criminalizing this online action is a necessary curb on the damage it can do. She makes a strong case that the U.S. Code should catch up to the pace of technological change.

We’re several years past the time the world crossed a Rubicon, with respect to the ability to share embarrassing images of one another. The global adoption of cheap camera phones, smartphones, social networks, search engines and wireless Internet access has created a tidal wave of disruptions across industries, governments and nations. Taking pictures with the world has been made trivially easy by those technologies, a capability that can capture both our best and worst moments.

When combined with the capacity to share those images with the rest of humanity in an instant, billions of people now wield great power in their back pockets. Whether they uphold the responsibility that comes with it is in question, given what history shows us of humans acting badly to those who have less power in society. The power to publicize and shame others is not equally distributed, given the expense of devices, data, and unequal access between the sexes.

In her op-ed, Citron anticipates the First Amendment concerns of organizations like the ACLU, arguing that it’s possible to craft sufficient limits into legislation — again, using New Jersey’s law as a model — that will enable the United States to preserve constitutional protections for free speech online.

“First Amendment protections are less rigorous for purely private matters because the threat of liability would not risk chilling the meaningful exchange of ideas,” writes Citron.

“Listeners and speakers have no legitimate interest in nude photos or sex tapes published without the subjects’ permission. That online users can claim a prurient interest in viewing sexual images does not transform them into a matter of legitimate public concern. Nonconsensual pornography lacks First Amendment value as a historical matter, and could be understood as categorically unprotected as obscenity. Although the Court’s obscenity doctrine has developed along different lines with distinct justifications, nonconsensual pornography can be seen as part of obscenity’s long tradition of proscription.”

The American Civil Liberties Union opposes the California legislation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has expressed concerns with how broadly it has been drafted.

Legal precision in how legislatures make revenge porn a criminal offense really will matter here, given both existing statutes and the number of entities that are involved in the act, from the person who took the image to the site that hosts it to the people who spread it.

Making anyone but the original person who broke the trust of another by uploading the picture culpable would run up against Section 230 of the United States Communications Decency Act, which provides “intermediary liability,” protecting online platforms from being held liable for user-generated content shared on them.

As more people gain the ability to take, store and share digital images, however, improving systems that govern non-consensual surveillance and distribution looks precisely like the kind of thorny problem that our elected representatives should grapple with in the 21st century.

Societies around the world will need to find answers that reconcile online civil rights with longstanding constitutional protections. The way the United States handles the issue could be a model for other states to consider — or not, if a dysfunctional Congress proves unable to enact effective legislation, a scenario that unfortunately seems all too likely over the next year.

Intelligence community turns to Tumblr and Twitter to provide more transparency on NSA surveillance programs

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Yesterday afternoon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence began tumbling towards something resembling more transparency regarding the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance programs.

The new tumblog, “Intelligence Community on the Record,” is a collection of  statements, declassified documents, congressional testimony by officials, speeches & media, interviews, fact sheets, details of oversight & legal compliance, and video. It’s a slick, slim new media vehicle, at least as compared to many government websites, although much of the content itself consists of redacted PDFs and images. (More on that later.) It’s unclear why ODNI chose Tumblr as its platform, though the lack of hosting costs, youthful user demographics and easy publishing have to have factored in.

In the context of the global furor over electronic surveillance that began this summer when the Washington Post and Guardian began publishing stories based upon the “NSA Files” leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the new tumblr has been met with a rather …skeptical reception online.

Despite its reception, the new site does represent a followthrough on President Obama’s commitment to set up a website to share information with the American people about these programs. While some people in the federal technology sector are hopeful:

…the site won’t be enough, on its own. The considerable challenge that it and the intelligence community faces is the global climate of anger, fear and distrust that have been engendered by a summer of fiery headlines. Despite falling trust in institutions, people still trust the media more than the intelligence community, particularly with respect to its role as a watchdog.

Some three hours after it went online, a series of new documents went online and were tweeted out through the new Twitter account, @IConTheRecord:

The launch of the website came with notable context.

First, as the Associated Press reported, some of the documents released were made public after a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In a significant court victory, the EFF succeeded in prompting the release of a 2011 secret court opinion finding NSA surveillance unconstitutional. It’s embedded below, along with a release on DNI.gov linked through the new tumblr.

The opinion showed that the NSA gathered thousands of Americans’ emails before the court struck down the program, causing the agency to recalibrate its practices.

Second, Jennifer Valentino and Siobhan Gorman Carpenter reported at The Wall Street Journal that the National Security Agency can reach 75% of Internet traffic in the United States. Using various programs, the NSA applies algorithms to filter and gather specific information from a dozen locations at major Internet junctions around North America. The NSA defended these programs as both legal and “respectful of Americans’ privacy,” according to Gorman and Valentino: According to NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, if American communications are “incidentally collected during NSA’s lawful signals intelligence activities,” the agency follows “minimization procedures that are approved by the U.S. attorney general and designed to protect the privacy of United States persons.”

The story, which added more reporting to confirm what has been published in the Guardian and Washington Post, included a handy FAQ with a welcome section detailed what was “new” in the Journal’s report. The FAQ also has clear, concise summaries of fun questions you might still have about these NSA programs after a summer of headlines, like “What privacy issues does this system raise?” or “Is this legal?”

The NSA subsequently released a statement disputing aspects of the Journal’s reporting, specifically the “the impression” that NSA is sifting through 75% of U.S. Internet communications, which the agency stated is “just not true.” The WSJ has not run a correction, however, standing by its reporting that the NSA possesses the capability to access and filter a majority of communications flowing over the Internet backbone.

Reaction to the disclosures has fallen along pre-existing fault lines: critical lawmakers and privacy groups are rattled, while analysts point to a rate of legal compliance well above 99%, with now-public audits showing most violations of the rules and laws that govern the NSA coming when “roamers” from outside of the U.S.A. traveled to the country.

Thousands of violations a year, however, even if they’re out of more than 240,000,000 made, is still significant, and the extent of surveillance reported and acknowledged clearly has the potential to have a chilling effect on free speech and press freedom, from self-censorship to investigative national security journalism. The debates ahead of the country, now more informed by disclosures, leaks and reporting, will range from increased oversight of programs to legislative proposals to update laws for collection and analysis to calls to significantly curtail or outright dissolve these surveillance programs all together.

Given reports of NSA analysts intentionally abusing their powers, some reforms to the laws that govern surveillance are in order, starting with making relevant jurisprudence public. Secret laws have no place in a democracy.

Setting all of that aside for a moment — it’s fair to say that this debate will continue playing out on national television, the front pages of major newspapers and online outlets and in the halls and boardrooms of power around the country — it’s worth taking a brief look at this new website that President Obama said will deliver more transparency into surveillance programs, along with the NSA’s broader approach to “transparency”. To be blunt, all too often it’s looked like this:

…so heavily redacted that media outlets can create mad libs based upon them.

That’s the sort of thing that leads people to suggest that the NSA has no idea what ‘transparency’ means. Whether that’s a fair criticism or not, the approach taken to disclosing documents as images and PDFs does suggest that the nation’s spy agency has not been following how other federal agencies are approaching releasing government information.

As Matt Stoller highlighted on Twitter, heavily redacted, unsearchable images make it extremely difficult to find or quote information.

Unfortunately, that failing highlights the disconnect between the laudable efforts the Obama administration has made to release open government data from federal agencies and regulators and the sprawling, largely unaccountable national security state aptly described as Top Secret America.”

Along with leak investigations and prosecution of whistleblowers, drones and surveillance programs have been a glaring exception to federal open government efforts, giving ample ammunition to those who criticize or outright mock President Obama’s stated aspiration to be the “most transparent administration in history.” As ProPublica reported this spring, the administration’s open government record has been mixed. Genuine progress on opening up data for services, efforts to leverage new opportunities afforded by technology to enable citizen participation or collaboration, and other goals set out by civil society has been overshadowed with failures on other counts, from the creation of the Affordable Care Act to poor compliance with the Freedom of Information Act and obfuscation of the extend of domestic surveillance.

In that context, here’s some polite suggestions to the folks behind the new ODNI tumblr regarding using the Web to communicate:

  • Post all documents as plaintext, not images and PDFs that defy easy digestion, reporting or replication. While the intelligence budget is classified, surely some of those untold billions could be allotted to persons taking time to release information in both human- and machine-readable formats.
  • Put up a series of Frequently Asked Questions, like the Wall Street Journal’s. Format them in HTML. Specifically address that reporting and provide evidence of what differs. Posting the joint statement on the WSJ stories as text is a start but doesn’t go far enough.
  • Post audio and plaintext transcripts of conference calls and all other press briefings with “senior officials.” Please stop making the latter “on background.” (The transcript of the briefing with NSA director of compliance John DeLong is a promising start, although getting it out of a PDF would be welcome.
  • Take questions on Twitter and at questions@nsa.gov or something similar. If people ask about programs, point them to that FAQ or write a new answer. The intelligence community is starting behind here, in terms of trust, but being responsive to the public would be a step in the right direction.
  • Link out to media reports that verify statements. After DNI Clapper gave his “least untruthful answer” to Senator Ron Wyden in a Congressional hearing, these “on the record” statements are received with a great deal of skepticism by many Americans. Simply saying something is true or untrue is unlikely to be received as gospel by all.
  • Use animated GIFs to communicate with a younger demographic. Actually, scratch that idea.

Berkman Center maps networked public sphere’s role in SOPA/PIPA debate

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A new paper from Yochai Benkler and co-authors at the Berkman Center maps how the networked public sphere led to the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act being defeated in the U.S. Congress.

“Abstract: “This paper uses a new set of online research tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed legislation in the United States designed to give prosecutors and copyright holders new tools to pursue suspected online copyright violations.”

Key insight: “We find that the fourth estate function was fulfilled by a network of small-scale commercial tech media, standing non-media NGOs, and individuals, whose work was then amplified by traditional media. Mobilization was effective, and involved substantial experimentation and rapid development. We observe the rise to public awareness of an agenda originating in the networked public sphere and its framing in the teeth of substantial sums of money spent to shape the mass media narrative in favor of the legislation. Moreover, we witness what we call an attention backbone, in which more trafficked sites amplify less-visible individual voices on specific subjects. Some aspects of the events suggest that they may be particularly susceptible to these kinds of democratic features, and may not be generalizable. Nonetheless, the data suggest that, at least in this case, the networked public sphere enabled a dynamic public discourse that involved both individual and organizational participants and offered substantive discussion of complex issues contributing to affirmative political action.”

One data set, however, was missing from the paper: the role of social media, in particular Twitter, in reporting, amplifying and discussing the bills. The microblogging platform connected many information nodes mapped out by Berkman, from hearings to activism, and notably did not shut down when much of the Internet “blacked out” in protest.

The paper extends Benkler’s comments on a networked public commons from last year.

As I wrote then, we’re in unexplored territory. We may have seen the dawn of new era of networked activism and participatory democracy, borne upon the tidal wave of hundreds of millions of citizens connected by mobile technology, social media platforms and open data.

As I also observed, all too presciently, that era will also include pervasive electronic surveillance, whether you’re online and offline, with commensurate threats to privacy, security, human rights and civil liberties, and the use of these technologies by autocratic government to suppress dissent or track down dissidents.

Finding a way for forward will not be easy but it’s clearly necessary.

U.S. House of Representatives publishes U.S. Code as open government data

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Three years on, Republicans in Congress continue to follow through on promises to embrace innovation and transparency in the legislative process. Today, the United States House of Representatives has made the United States Code available in bulk Extensible Markup Language (XML).

“Providing free and open access to the U.S. Code in XML is another win for open government,” said Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, in a statement posted to Speaker.gov. “And we want to thank the Office of Law Revision Counsel for all of their work to make this project a reality. Whether it’s our ‘read the bill’ reforms, streaming debates and committee hearings live online, or providing unprecedented access to legislative data, we’re keeping our pledge to make Congress more transparent and accountable to the people we serve.”

House Democratic leaders praised the House of Representatives Office of the Law Revision Counsel (OLRC) for the release of the U.S. Code in XML, demonstrating strong bipartisan support for such measures.

“OLRC has taken an important step towards making our federal laws more open and transparent,” said Whip Steny H. Hoyer, in a statement.

“Congress has a duty to publish our collective body of enacted federal laws in the most modern and accessible way possible, which today means publishing our laws online in a structured, digital format. I congratulate the OLRC for completing this significant accomplishment. This is another accomplishment of the Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force. The Task Force was created in a bipartisan effort during last year’s budget process. I want to thank Reps. Mike Honda and Mike Quigley for their leadership in this area, and Speaker Boehner and Leader Cantor for making this task force bipartisan. I also want to commend the dedicated civil servants who are leading the effort from the non-partisan legislative branch agencies, like OLRC, who work diligently behind the scenes – too often without recognition – to keep Congress working and moving forward.”

The reaction from open government advocates was strongly positive.

“Today’s announcement is another milestone in the House of Representatives efforts to modernize how legislative information is made available to the American people,” said Daniel Schuman, policy director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “The release of the US Code in Bulk XML is the culmination of several years of work, and complements the House’s efforts to publish House floor and committee data online, in real time, and in machine readable formats. Still awaiting resolution – and the focus of the transparency community’s continuing efforts — is the bulk release of legislative status information.” (More from Schuman at the CREW blog.)

“I think they did an outstanding job,” commented Eric Mill, a developer at the Sunlight Foundation. “Historically, the U.S. Code has been extremely difficult to reliably and accurately use as data. These new XML files are sensibly designed, thoroughly documented, and easy to use.”

The data has already been ingested into open government websites.

“Just this morning, Josh Tauberer updated our public domain U.S. Code parser to make use of the new XML version of the US Code,” said Mill. “The XML version’s consistent design meant we could fix bugs and inaccuracies that will contribute directly to improving the quality of GovTrack’s and Sunlight’s work, and enables more new features going forward that weren’t possible before. The public will definitely benefit from the vastly more reliable understanding of our nation’s laws that today’s XML release enables.” (More from Tom Lee at the Sunlight Labs blog.)

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, similarly applauded the release.

“This is great progress toward better public oversight of government,” he said. “Having the U.S. Code in XML can allow websites, apps, and information services to weave together richer stories about how the law applies and how Congress is thinking about changing it.”

Harper also contrasted the open government efforts of the Obama administration, which has focused more upon the release of open government data relevant to services, with that of the House of Representatives. While the executive and legislative branches are by definition apples and oranges, the comparison has value.

“Last year, we reported that House Republicans had the transparency edge on Senate Democrats and the Obama administration,” he said. “(House Democrats support the Republican leadership’s efforts.) The release of the U.S. Code in XML joins projects like docs.house.gov and beta.congress.gov in producing actual forward motion on transparency in Congress’s deliberations, management, and results.

For over a year, I’ve been pointing out that there is no machine-readable federal government organization chart. Having one is elemental transparency, and there’s some chance that the Obama administration will materialize with the Federal Program Inventory. But we don’t know yet if agency and program identifiers will be published. The Obama administration could catch up or overtake House Republicans with a little effort in this area. Here’s hoping they do.”

This article has been updated with additional statements over time.

Intelligence executive David Bray to become new FCC CIO

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david-bray-flack-jacketDavid Bray, a seasoned national intelligence executive (CV), will be the next chief information officer of the Federal Communications Commission. He’s expected to finish his work in the intelligence community at the Office of the Director for National Intelligence and commence work at the FCC in August.

“As the next FCC CIO, I look forward [to] aiding the FCC’s strong workforce in pioneering new IT solutions for spectrum auctions, next-gen cybersecurity, mobile workforce options, real-time enterprise analytics, enhanced open data, and several other vital public-private initiatives,” wrote Bray, in an email sent to staff and partners Monday night.

Bray holds a a PhD in information systems, a MSPH in public health informatics, and a BSCI in computer science and biology from Emory University, alongside a visiting associateship from the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute, and two post-doctoral associateships with MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence and the Harvard Kennedy School. He also has served as a visiting associate with the National Defense University. Bray’s career also includes deployments to Afghanistan, projects at the Department of Energy and work at the Center of Disease Control.

Bray will inherit many IT challenges from former FCC CIO Robert Naylor, who announced that he’d be stepping down in December 2012. His background in the intelligence community will serve him well, with respect to network security issues, but he’ll need to continue to transition an agency that has traditionally outsourced much of its technology to 21st century computing standards and approaches to building infrastructure and meeting increasing demand for services.

Bray’s past work in collective intelligence, informatics, public health and data science suggest that he’ll have no shortage of vision to bring to the role. His challenge, as is true for every federal CIO these days, will be to work within limited budgets and under intense scrutiny to deliver on the promise.

To get a sense of Bray, watch his talk on “21st century social institutions at a brunch for Emory University scholars, in 2013: