I'm very excited to be teaching a new course Working with Open Data at the UC Berkeley School of Information in the Spring 2013 semester: Open data — data that is free for use, reuse, and redistribution — is an intellectual treasure-trove that has given rise to many unexpected and often fruitful applications. In this [...]
Rusty Talbot posted the following request for feedback on the Sunlight Labs list this morning The Recovery, Accountability, & Transparency Board wishes to have an open discussion with all interested developers about how data should be made available via Recovery.gov. As you are all aware, a new version of Recovery.gov will be released soon. From [...]
Tagged recovery.gov tracking[Post in progress] In this post, I will write about my project proposal for the upcoming Freebase HackDay. The project is to elaborate the prototype at An org chart of the US Federal Government Based on OMB agency and bureau codes. See what I've written at http://www.freebase.com/discuss/threads/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000c697aa0: I'm writing up a longer post right now, [...]
As many have jumped into making recommendations on how Recovery data should be packaged and disseminated, I'm reminded of some important previous work in this area. The first is the ACM U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) Recommendations on Open Government. I have a tremendous respect for the ACM as "the world’s largest educational and scientific [...]
Irregularities at recovery.gov Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee Why are there two reports with the same date? This screenshot is from the reports from the Department of Labor on recovery.gov.
Earlier in the week, Erik Wilde, Eric Kansa, and I published our technical report Proposed Guideline Clarifications for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a set of technical guidelines for how we think recovery.gov should publish data about how stimulus money is being spent and a prototype of what people can do with the [...]
I'm co-leading a meetup around government transparency in San Francisco next Wednesday, March 11, 2009: Democracy Web President Barack Obama has promised an era of unprecedented transparency for the US government. In anticipation of vast flows of data from the federal government in the weeks and months to come, we are organizing a SF Bay [...]
The new About CC0 — “No Rights Reserved” Creative Commons license has been released as 1.0. This new license gives "creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law." Great. Wondering when it'll be available for regular users to associate with their own [...]
Tagged creative commons, FlickrI just posed a question on the sunlightlabs api group (ok to push data sets and APIs to Freebase.com? – Sunlight Labs API Discussion | Google Groups): My question is whether it's ok for me to upload some of the data I can get from http://services.sunlightlabs.com/api/ to freebase.com. Freebase then makes its collection of data [...]
Tagged freebase, sunlighI've been thinking about how to prepare for tomorrow's Build-A-Base tutorial at Freebase. I've already started building two bases: PolDB prototype — a prototype of an IMDB for American politicians Semantic History of Art Prototypes – something I want to develop into a NEH grant proposal For the PolDB project, I should sit down to [...]