Jason Hare's Data Management Blog

All parts of North Carolina will benefit from open data legislation. FOR THE BETTER PART OF TWO DECADES, I’VE WORKED TO OPEN UP NORTH CAROLINA’S DATA. I’ve been a public servant at Durham Public Schools and the Department of Energy. I have been an onsite consultant for the Cities of Raleigh, Durham as well as the Towns of Cary and Chapel Hill. I’ve been on teams serving state agencies and local governments. I’ve witnessed dozens of open data projects both locally and abroad. All of these projects share crucial steps and goals in common. First, by transforming public documents from disconnected PDFs into machine-readable data, by applying the right open formats, we can liberate public information from the repositories where it used to require manual review. Insights become instant. Second, by publishing machine-readable data compilations online, for everyone to use, we can crowdsource those insights. Citizens and companies and the media can scrutinize. Even better, when a government age...

Governments large and small spend considerable amounts of public money to pay for health facilities, public safety, social aid and public works, and capital improvement projects. This money is usually derived from taxes that are allocated to federal programs by Congress, but they can also come directly from agency fines, fees, or settlement collections. This makes reporting Federal public spending data including agency financial information somewhat problematic and just plain difficult. CHALLENGES TO REPORTING FEDERAL PUBLIC SPENDING DATA Public spending and budgets are absolutely essential  to publish as Open Data . This post will describe some of the challenges and opportunities in helping the public to understand where Federal public spending is going and to whom; especially the difference between the use of standards in regulatory versus financial data reporting. Several pieces of legislation are about to take effect at the federal level in 2017. Congress should take action imm...

A look back at Virginia’s 4 years of data innovation with Anthony Fung, Deputy Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia  Welcome to the OpenDataSoft Leadership Podcast Series, “Open Data Discussions”. Each month, Jason Hare, our Open Data Evangelist, features a different open data program around the country to discuss what has made it successful. These examples will provide insights and strategies that you can implement in your own city. We had the pleasure of welcoming Anthony Fung, Deputy Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia for the fifth podcast in our series. Anthony discussed various subjects, including: What role does open data play in policymaking at the state level in Virginia? Does his department work on ensuring open data quality? What are some of the steps he makes in ensuring sound data governance? How did Virginia come up with this technology and engagement solutions?  How, for exampl...