Politics

What Data Do You Want? How Would You Use It?

By Ellen Miller

Based on the Open Government Directive issued by the White House yesterday, American Public Media is asking its National Public Insight Network to find out what kind of data people would really like to see. Here’s a link to their survey.

Minnesota Public Radio has already begun to ask its listeners this question: What Data Do You Want? How Would You Use It? And the answers they are getting are serious, thoughtful and informative.  Here are some recent submissions (each from a different contributor):

I would like to be able to able to “drag and drop” any type of event data – such as legislative voting records of a bill, purchases by an agency, crime report in my neighborhood, right on to my Google home page to get updates in real time. There are many standards (RSS/Atom etc.) that make this easy to do…

NRCS data. Billions of dollars go to federal farm subsidy programs and the FOIA forbids sharing specifics of that data, even among agencies. The federal info could be very valuable to state agencies working on pollution control projects and also represents a major lack of transparency in a federal program…

I would like to see very clear and very precise information on private donations to our elected officials. Specifically how much money, goods, and services were donated and what interest group the donations represent. I would like this information made public as soon as the donations are made – not several years after a vote was taken on an issue…

Information about contributions to political parties that are over $1,000 and an easy way to access what earmarks are attached to bills passed by congress, better yet a system that connects earmarks with contributions in the same data base…

This is really good stuff. There’s a meme here. Online. RealTime. Data.

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on December 09, 2009 (boomark / email).