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Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

New report on open government data

data_maturity

A new report by the Data Foundation and Grant Thornton LLP “seeks to capture the moment, provide a vision of the future, and catalyze further efforts for the open data movement.” It includes interviews with more than 40 Congressional and agency leaders, open data experts and advocates, and private sector leaders. It also has a a brief history and timeline of the open data movement

NextGov has a brief summary of the report:

2016 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference (#LDTC16), Tue, Jun 21, 2016

Sign up now for this year’s Legislative Data and Transparency Conference (#LDTC16) held in Washington DC. In years past, they’ve streamed the proceedings, so definitely sign up for free if you’re interested in open legislative data, even if you’re not in the DC area!

The 2016 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference (#LDTC16), hosted by the Committee on House Administration, will take place on Tuesday, June 21, 2016, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Capitol Visitor Center Congressional Auditorium.

The #LDTC16 brings individuals from Legislative Branch agencies together with data users and transparency advocates to foster a conversation about the use of legislative data – addressing how agencies use technology well and how they can use it better in the future.

WHEN
Tuesday, June 21, 2016 from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM (EDT) – Add to Calendar
WHERE
Capitol Visitor Center Congressional Auditorium

via 2016 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference Tickets, Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 9:00 AM | Eventbrite.

ProPublica launches tool to track Congressional members, encourages data download!

I’ve had a tab open to this ProPublica post “A New Way to Keep an Eye on Who Represents You in Congress” for a couple of weeks and just now getting around to sharing. Their new project called “Represent” is a great way to track on lawmakers, the bills they consider and the votes they take (and miss). Search for your legislators by address, ZIP code or name. A very handy tool indeed. But 2 things stand out especially about this new effort: 1) “Represent” not only collates data from a variety of government resources (see below) but they also point out to other sites that offer valuable features like individual lawmaker and bill pages on GovTrack and C-SPAN; and 2) They’re making available all the data that they use through their API. Their data sources include:

Check it out, bookmark it, and let your library patrons know about it!

Today ProPublica is launching a new interactive database that will help you keep track of the officials who represent you in Congress.

The project is the continuation of two projects I worked on at The New York Times — the first is the Inside Congress database, which we are taking over at ProPublica starting today.

But we also have big plans for it. While the original interactive database at The Times focused on bills and votes, our new project adds pages for each elected official, where you can find their latest votes, legislation they support and statistics about their voting. As we move forward we want to add much more data to help you understand how your elected officials represent you, the incentives that drive them and the issues they care about.

In that way, it is also a continuation of another project I worked on at the Times. In late 2008, The New York Times launched an app called Represent that connected city residents with the officials who represented them at the local, state and federal levels. It was an experiment in trying to make it easier to keep track of what elected officials were doing.

Because ProPublica is rekindling that effort, we’re calling the new project Represent.

The new Represent will help you track members, votes and bills in the House of Representatives and Senate. We’re also launching a Congress API, or Application Programming Interface, so developers can get data about what Congress is doing, too.

via A New Way to Keep an Eye on Who Represents You in Congress – ProPublica.

Department of Commerce Data Usability Project

This certainly seems to be the year when open government data really flowers. From NASA to Census to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) — not to mention data.gov! — across the Federal government, agencies are setting up developer sites with open APIs so that the public can reuse agency data and information. Just search “API site:*.gov” and you’ll find a bunch of agency open data sites.

Now we can add the Department of Commerce, which has recently released a site called the Commerce Data Usability Project. The site has some great usability tutorials (and hopefully will have more soon!) to help people get started with Dept of Commerce data and tools like R, Python, and Javascript. Check it out.

With tens of thousands of datasets ranging from satellite imagery to material standards to demographic surveys, the U.S. Department of Commerce has long been in the business of Open Data. Through the Commerce Data Usability Project, go on a series of guided tours through the Commerce data lake and learn how you can leverage this free and open data to unlock the possible.

USGS releases plan to increase public access to scientific research

This is welcome news indeed! According to a press release yesterday, the US Geological Service (USGS) has just released its plan “Public Access to Results of Federally Funded Research at the U.S. Geological Survey: Scholarly Publications and Digital Data.” The USGS open access plan is in response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)’s 2013 directive on open access to scientific research (unfortunately, the release of the USGS plan was too late to be listed on OSTP’s January 29, 2016 memo to the Senate and House Appropriations Committees which listed the 11 agencies — plus 5 Dept of Health and Human Services sub-agencies! — which have published open access plans.)

The plan stipulates that, beginning October 1, the USGS will require that any research it funds be released from the publisher and available free to the public no later than 12 months after initial publication. More importantly, USGS will also require that data used to support the findings be available free to the public when the associated study is published.

Specifically, this plan requires that an electronic copy of either the accepted manuscript or the final publication of record is available through the USGS Publications Warehouse. Digital data will be available in machine readable form from the USGS Science Data Catalog. The plan will require the inclusion of data management plans in all new research proposals and grants.

[HT Sabrina Pacifici @ beSpacific!]

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