What’s next for open data in the United States? That was the open question posed at the Center for Data Innovation (CDI) last week, where a panel of industry analysts and experts gathered to discuss the historic open government data … Continue reading →
The arc of open government in United States is long, but perhaps it will bend towards transparency and accountability as 2018 comes to a close, in an unlikely moment in our history. After years of dedicated effort by advocates and bipartisan leadership in both houses of Congress, the Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary Government Data Act (AKA the OPEN Government Data Act) is about to become law after the United States Senate passed the bill as part of H.R. 4174 on December 19.
Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) shared the news in a tweet last night:
We just passed a bill that requires all data the govt collects (that isn’t secret or private) to be machine readable and interoperable. It’s data that taxpayers paid for and they deserve access – weather, traffic, census, budget numbers – it’s your info and you should have it.
Last night the Senate passed a bill I introduced in the House called the Open Government Data Act! There are so many possibilities for our economy when folks can access data they paid to develop and fund through the nation’s largest angel investor, Unce Sam. https://t.co/BvMX54mcCY
Here’s Schatz speaking about the bill at a Data Coalition event last winter:
Two steps remain: passage of the bill in the House and President Donald J. Trump signing it into law. Barring a scheduling issue or unexpected change (keep an eye out for shenanigans on the House floor today), the nation is close to a historic codification of two powerful principles:
public information should be open by default to the public in a machine-readable format, where such publication doesn’t harm privacy or security
federal agencies should use evidence to make public policy
Along with making open government data the default in U.S. government and requiring the White House Office of Management and Budget to oversee enterprise data inventories for every agency, the bill would require federal agencies to do the following, as listed in the summary from the Law Library of Congress:
This bill requires departments and agencies identified in the Chief Financial Officers Act to submit annually to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Congress a plan for identifying and addressing policy questions relevant to the programs, policies, and regulations of such departments and agencies.
The plan must include: (1) a list of policy-relevant questions for developing evidence to support policymaking, and (2) a list of data for facilitating the use of evidence in policymaking.
The OMB shall consolidate such plans into a unified evidence building plan.
The bill establishes an Interagency Council on Evaluation Policy to assist the OMB in supporting government-wide evaluation activities and policies. The bill defines “evaluation” to mean an assessment using systematic data collection and analysis of one or more programs, policies, and organizations intended to assess their effectiveness and efficiency.
Each department or agency shall designate a Chief Evaluation Officer to coordinate evidence-building activities and an official with statistical expertise to advise on statistical policy, techniques, and procedures.
The OMB shall establish an Advisory Committee on Data for Evidence Building to advise on expanding access to and use of federal data for evidence building.
Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary Government Data Act or the OPEN Government Data Act
This bill requires open government data assets to be published as machine-readable data.
Each agency shall: (1) develop and maintain a comprehensive data inventory for all data assets created by or collected by the agency, and (2) designate a Chief Data Officer who shall be responsible for lifecycle data management and other specified functions.
The bill establishes in the OMB a Chief Data Officer Council for establishing government-wide best practices for the use, protection, dissemination, and generation of data and for promoting data sharing agreements among agencies.
While the United States would not be not the first democracy to pass such a law, it would be a welcome advance, codifying many aspects of the open government data policies that have been developed and promulgated in the federal government over the past decade.
How did open government data get into the US Code?
This was no accident of fate or circumstance: This bill, which was previously passed by the House last month, was sponsored by the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. It’s an important element of his legislative legacy, and one that can and should earn praise – unlike other aspects of his time with the gavel.
It’s taken years of advocacy and activism by a broad coalition to get here, including the Sunlight Foundation, the EFF, Business Software Alliance, Center for Data Innovation, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, American Library Association, the R Street Institute, among many others, and bipartisan efforts on both sides of the aisle. Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) co-sponsored the OGDA in the Senate, with 5 others, and former Representative Blake Farenthold (R-TX) cosponsored it in House, with 12 others.
While it has been watered down a bit, what I argued then is still true today: the bill “offers a genuine opportunity to not only improve how the nation makes decisions but embed more openness into how the federal government conducts the public’s business.”
The addition of OGDA into that bill was “an important endorsement of open government data by one of the most powerful politicians in the world” and “a milestone for the open movement, an important validation of this way of making public policy, and the fundamental principles of data-driven 21st century governance.”
I picked up the transparency baton on OGDA from former Sunlight analyst Matt Rumsey, Sunlight federal policy manager Sean Vitka, OpenGov Foundation founder Seamus Kraft, and Data Coalition founder Hudson Hollister, who drafted the original open data bill, working to make the principle that “public data created with taxpayer dollars should be available to the public in open, machine-readable forms when doing so does not damage privacy or national security” the law.
This is a huge win for public access to public information that every American can and should celebrate today. Special thanks for this victory are due to Christian Hoehner, policy director for the Data Coalition, who did extraordinary yeoman’s work getting this through Congress, Sasha Moss of the R Street Institute, Hollister, Daniel Schuman of Demand Progress, Daniel Castro and Joshua New at the Center for Data Innovation, and Gavin Baker from the American Library Association, some with whom I went to Congress with me to meet with staff over the years and advocated for the bill on and offline.
The passage of this bill won’t mean that the scanned images of spreadsheets that agencies still send in response to FOIA requests will magically go away tomorrow, but journalists, watchdogs and the public can now tell civil servants that they’re now behind the times: open government data is now the default in the USA! Please publish our data on the agency website in a structured format and let the public know.
This morning, James Grimaldi reported that Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has told two U.S. Senators that he has proposed “to rebuild and re-engineer” the agency’s online electronic comment system “to institute appropriate safeguards against abusive conduct.” … Continue reading →
I think they’re right — which should be no surprise given my focus on advocating for more political transparency in Washington over the two years I spent at the Sunlight Foundation — but reviewing reports of unlabeled political ads is going to be hard.
Overall, this site is a welcome step towards more transparency, but misses the mark. The site only “exceeds expectations” if you think a search interface that exposes no underlying data is sufficient to inform the public and regulators.
It was easy to use @Facebook‘s new archive of “ads with political content” – essentially a simple search tool for paid political ads that have run since May 7, 2018 – once I got on my laptop and logged in. I found recent ads that matched Trump, Clinton, gun control & corruption. pic.twitter.com/Fhx0lrMzBE
On the one hand, it was easy to use Facebook’s new archive of “ads with political content” – essentially a simple search tool for paid political ads that have run since May 7, 2018 – at least once I got on my laptop and logged into Facebook. I found recent ads that matched Trump, Clinton, gun control and corruption.
If you click on “see ad performance,” you can learn more about each ad.
If you click “see ad performance,” you see the ad content, who paid, when it was active, how many impressions it received, total spent, & breakdown of audience by age, gender & location.
But clicking “view all ads” brings you to aggregate search results, NOT the page or a profile pic.twitter.com/8XtzmWqdYy
If you click on the username, you arrive at the Page behind the ads. Unfortunately, there’s no tab for political ads or link to this archive. It’s hard to see how folks will find them, without it.
If you click on the username – in this case, Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump‘s campaign account on @Facebook – you arrive at the Page behind the ads. Unfortunately, there’s no tab for political ads or link to this archive. It’s hard to see how folks will find them, without it. pic.twitter.com/EASlccVAhF
As sociology professor Zeynep Tufecki noted, no one — whether member of the public, the press, watchdog, academic, regulator or legislator – should have to agree to Facebook’s Terms of Service and become a user to access political data.
😱 You shouldn’t have to agree to Facebook TOS in order to access information about political reports. In fact, that is a core problem. I’ve seen examples where schools put *emergency* information on Facebook and people have to agree to FB TOS to learn whether children are safe. https://t.co/6kmsOXgYgu
To Facebook’s credit, the director of product at Facebook, Rob Leathern, responded publicly to Tufecki on Twittter, stating that this page is a first step:
“More ways are coming to make the ads with political content and information more accessible to people. One of those is an API, another is exploring opening the archive to people not on Facebook. We started with the Facebook community to see how they use the tool and gain feedback from third parties, including our newly-formed Election Commission. We’ll continue to update on our progress.”
If Facebook started with open data with no log-in, they could have gotten feedback from third parties like the Center for Responsive Politics or the public. No one should have to be part of Facebook’s “community” to understand who is buying electioneering on the platform, for whom, and what’s being shown.
As I commented to Leathern, if Facebook is only “exploring” making this archive open to people not on Facebook, then it is not implementing the Honest Ads Act, as its staff has claimed to Congress and the public. I asked Facebook to post a public ad file as bulk open data on the open Web.
Leathern told me that “we have prioritized getting the archive in the hands of people to use (as of today) + will follow up soon with an archive API. Thank you for the feedback, we are definitely listening.”
The good news is that I think Facebook understands this page as a start, not an end. In a post that closes matches what he told me, Leathern wrote that they’re “working closely” with a new “Election Commission” to launch an API for the archives.
It’s good news, but no deadline cited.
It’s hard for me not to be happy that Facebook is finally explicitly embracing political ad transparency in words and (some) deeds, including public soul searching about what constitutes a political ad and a policy.
That’s progress.
It’s just long overdue. Ultimately, elected representatives should be the ones to enact standards for transparency for political ads online after debate, not tech company executives.
I hope Facebook, its founder and its staff deliver on its most recent promises and their public obligations. Given past, current or predictable interference, opacity is unpatriotic.
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researchers from the Open Government Partnership’s Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) shared a new end of term report that detailed both progress and regression in meeting the commitments in the third United States National Action Plan for Open Government between October 2015 and May 2017. To be charitable, the researchers found a mixed record on open government during that time period, with poor public engagement, limited government feedback, and lack of civil society setting the agenda or participating in an iterative dialog with government. Continue reading →
Imagine searching Facebook, Google or Twitter for the status of a bill before Congress and getting an instant result. That future is now here, but it’s not evenly implemented yet.
For the open government advocates, activists and civic hackers that have been working for over a decade for this moment, seeing Congress turn on the data tap was a historic shift.
It took 14 years 9 months 6 days after I asked: Congress is now publishing actual data on the status of legislation. https://t.co/ITtDev12Xs
Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle applauded the release of House and Senate bill status information by the U.S. Government Printing Office and Library of Congress.
“Today’s release of bill status information via bulk download is a watershed moment for Congressional transparency,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), in a statement. “By modernizing our approach to government and increasing public access to information, we can begin to repair the relationship between the people and their democratic institutions. The entire Congressional community applauds the dedication of the Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force, the Office of the Clerk, the House Appropriations Committee, GPO, and the Library of Congress, which worked together to make this progress possible.”
“Building off previous releases of bills and summaries, today’s release of bill status information largely completes the overarching goal of providing bulk access to all the legislative data that traditionally has been housed on Thomas.gov and now also resides on Congress.gov,” said Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD). “This is a major accomplishment that has been many years in the making. It goes a long way toward making Congress more transparent and accessible to innovation through third party apps and systems. I applaud the dedicated civil servants who made this possible at the Legislative Branch service agencies, and I want to thank the Bulk Data Task Force for their leadership in this effort. While this largely completes a major goal of the Task Force, I look forward to continuing to workwith them to further modernize the U.S. Congress.”
The impact of open government data releases depend upon publicy and political agency. Releasing the states of bills before Congress in a way that can be baked in by third party apps and services is a critical, laudable step in that direction, but much more remains to be done in making the data more open and putting it to use and re-use. If the Library of Congress opens up an application programming interface for the data that supplies both Congress.gov and the public, it would help to reduce the asynchrony of legislative information between the public and elites who can afford to pay for Politico’s Legislative Compass or Quorum Analytics that is the status quo today.
In an era when Congress job approval ratings and trust in government are at historic lows, the shift didn’t make news beyond the Beltway. Govtrack.us, which is based upon data scraped from the Library of Congress, has been online for years. Until this XML data is used by media and technology companies in ways that provide the public with more understanding of what Congress is doing on their behalf and give them more influence in that legislative process, that’s unlikely to change quickly.
Nelson shared the document over email with people who contributed to the online draft.
Thank you so much for contributing to the civil society model National Action Plan. The Plan has made its way from Google Site to Word doc (attached)! We will share these recommendations with the White House, and I encourage you to share your commitments with any government contacts you have. If you notice any errors made in the transition from web to document, please let me know. If there are any other organizations that should be named as contributors, we will certainly add them as well. The White House’s consultation for their plan will continue throughout the summer, so there are still opportunities to weigh in. Additional recommendations on surveillance transparency and beneficial ownership are in development. We will work to secure meetings with the relevant agencies and officials to discuss these recommendations and make a push for their inclusion in the official government plan. So, expect to hear from us in the coming weeks!