
New Jersey Open Data Initiative - rmason
http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2016/Bills/S1000/727_I1.HTM
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baldfat
It's all about the format:

My city's school district makes images of the spreadsheets and then publishes
them in a pdf. USELESS

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otoburb
While deplorable from an accessibility standpoint, at least the data is
available and out in the open to the public. One small step in the right
direction.

EDIT: Tabula[1] is an open source tool to extract tables from PDFs into
CSV/Excel format in case one really needs to process data trapped in PDF
documents.

[1] [http://tabula.technology](http://tabula.technology)

~~~
rcthompson
Does Tabula do OCR? That's what would be required for tables embedded as
images.

~~~
josephfrazier
Unfortunately, it doesn't. From
[https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula](https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula):

> Caveat: Tabula only works on text-based PDFs, not scanned documents. If you
> can click-and-drag to select text in your table in a PDF viewer (even if the
> output is disorganized trash), then your PDF is text-based and Tabula should
> work.

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goblin89
Yay: “…the bill requires the Department of the Treasury to establish an
unique, dedicated, easily navigable Internet website which will offer to the
public all available appropriate[0] existing and future electronic data sets
maintained by each State department and agency.”

Not so yay: generally nobody’s going to be liable for incomplete or inaccurate
data, with an exception of “gross negligence, willful and wanton misconduct,
or intentional misconduct”.

Understandable: “No personally identifiable information would be posted
online”

Unclear: “State departments and agencies would not be required to make data
sets available upon demand”

[0] It seems that the availability and appropriateness is where things might
stall. What if a department gives the Treasurer a dataset full of personally
identifiable information? They thus fulfill their duty per this bill, the
dataset is available, and yet public sees nothing, unless Treasury goes an
extra mile and takes care of anonymizing the dataset.

~~~
jkingsbery
Agreed. Given how things work in NJ, I'm pretty skeptical real insight will
come of this, much more likely to just be a PR thing for state agencies.

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awjr
I'm involved with Bath Hacked (UK) a community interest company set up in
partnership with the local council which actively hunts out council data sets
that can be published in the data store.

The site: [https://www.bathhacked.org/](https://www.bathhacked.org/) The data
store: [https://data.bathhacked.org/](https://data.bathhacked.org/)

We run hackathons and also reach out to various organisations for data sets
that although we may not be able to publish in the datastore, can result in
very interesting tools.

The most recent data we got our hands on was the bike share hire programme.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AfocuESnSg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AfocuESnSg)

~~~
awjr
I'm unsure why I'm being downvoted, but I think it's probably to do with
qualifying why Bath Hacked is important and had been mentioned in Parliament
and is used as a national example.

Bath and North East Somerset council now have a policy to open as much data as
possible to the public, directly as a result of BH.

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throwaway922
There are __zero __accountability clauses in this bill. If administrators can
't be held accountable for providing complete, accurate, and parsable data
then what the public could expect is cherry-picked, bottom of the barrel
information that is of little to no value.

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smartbit
Has google won and coerced a government to make personal data available to
them to harvest?

~~~
Splendor
From the text of the law:

"No personally identifiable information shall be posted online unless the
identified individual has consented to the posting or the posting is necessary
to fulfill the lawful purposes or duties of the department or agency."

~~~
midgetjones
Always read the T&Cs!

