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...

In response to "The Potential of Open Data" published by Deirdre Lee, at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, NUI Galway (www.insight-centre.org), I offer my opinion on the health of the government's open data efforts to date. Ireland needs to take a page from Sir Francis Maude and not the US. The US open data initiative is an embarrassment. Embrace "Data is the 21st century’s new raw material." The Beginning of Open Data in Ireland To be fair, Ireland is just beginning the road to open data after an internal struggle stretching back five years. The Irish Minister of Reform, Brendan Howlin, has also wisely eliminated FOI fees for information requests. This FOI issue has long been a point of political divisiveness in Ireland. Indeed at the Open Government Partnership Summit in Dublin this past year, I witnessed street demonstrations against FOI. Government creates an Open Data Initiative In late January, a tender was issued by the CIO of Ireland, William...