

Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies - xPaw
http://project-open-data.github.io/policy-memo/

======
bane
Something I've been continuously impressed with is the incredible amount of
highly detailed data the U.S. government collects on just about everything. I
don't mean spooky scary intelligence data, but more mundane things like the
Census and Geospatial data. If you dig long enough you can find data on almost
anything.

I think France does something similar, and I've been impressed with the few
bits of data that I've seen from the U.K. (but some of it is stuck behind
weird trademark laws or something). But I'm largely lost behind language
barriers in finding this out for other countries.

What other countries do this?

~~~
malandrew
More than you would imagine. The problem has always been awareness, access,
noise and definitions. Most people aren't aware data relevant to them is
collected and when they discover data they want, it's in a format that is
difficult to use or full of noise. And even if you get clean data in a format
you want, it can be hard to find official definitions and criteria describing
the data, so it's not uncommon for two agencies to appear to collect the same
data, but it's not really the same data because those agencies are working
under their own varied definition or criteria.

When I worked as a financial analyst in Brazil, I was amazed at the data that
was available from IBGE and various other governmental agencies. Despite the
availability of data, it was rarely in a format that was useful without
constantly having to writing a special scraper/parser. And even then the same
type of data was inconsistent between sources.

------
duggieawesome

      The app Project Open Data will be able to:
    
      Read your public information.
      Update your user profile.
      Update your public and private repositories (Commits, Issues, etc).
      Create and edit gists.

~~~
lallysingh
Meh. Just go here [https://github.com/project-open-data/project-open-
data.githu...](https://github.com/project-open-data/project-open-
data.github.io) instead.

------
glitchdout
Wow, a tremendous step towards transparency. Wish my country did this, but one
can dream...

The site is just gorgeous (<http://project-open-data.github.io/>). And most
important of all, editing the content is really easy (although you need a
GitHub account for that). I'll have to check out the GitHub editor they are
using.

Published law as a living, collaborative document. This is the future!

Edit: Hmm, why is it that in my RSS feed the submission link goes to
<https://github.com/blog/1499-the-revolution-will-be-forked> and here it goes
to a random page on the open-data site?

------
pwang
The schema.md they link to currently leads to a 404...

------
BrianEatWorld
1.e. No PDFs.

