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...

In looking forward to the next administration, the Center for Open Data Enterprise is excited to present the Open Data Transition Report, a nonpartisan informational report that offers an action plan for developing government data policy and programs. We invite you to attend a briefing featuring an overview of the report and perspectives from several experts. Featured speakers will talk about the importance of open government data and the opportunities for open data to make an impact. An Action Plan for Open Data in the Next Administration 12:00pm - 2:00pm October 24, 2016 National Press Club, Holeman Lounge The briefing will feature the following speakers: The Honorable Michelle K. Lee - Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office Max Stier - President and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service Shelley Metzenbaum - Good government catalyst; Senior...

Written by Sam McClenney.  View original article > The topic of macro-openness and the idea of openness as an institution (which is the next topic) overlap a good bit and so in the interest of not being redundant, I’m going to try and keep them as separate and unique as possible. That means this Medium post is going to be a little shorter than the others I have done. It also means that it will be more focused as well. Pretty much all of my Medium posts up until now have been about openness at a very local level, aka micro-openness. Here’s an interesting question though. How do all these grassroots organizations or open evangelists know when something is open? What are the requirements for data to be open? What technological barometers have to be met for something to be considered open source? Who makes these decisions? How are standards set for openness? All of these are questions that we answer by looking at openness at a macro level. The White...

+OpenDataSoft participated in the celebration that was 8 years in the making at the White House. Yesterday, for the first time, the White House held the 2016 Open Data Innovation Summit.  I work for OpenDataSoft as the Open Data Evangelist. I was asked to introduce the White House Agenda and then to speak on Civic Innovation regarding Open Data. What I said and what I wanted to say were different. The event was full of excitement and also of reflection Megan Smith and Tony Scott kicked off the event touting the 200k datasets that had been released through Data.Gov. Certainly this is refreshing from even a decade ago when serious effort and even lawsuits were required to make data available to the public. That all was not good and could be better was brought up by +Alex Howard from the Sunlight Foundation. Alex noted that HTML and PDFs were counted among the "datasets" being released. Note that while HTML and PDFs are indeed 1 star ...

OPEN DATA PANEL TO BE FEATURED WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26 SEPTEMBER 26, 2016 Open Data will be a featured panel discussion at the All Things Open conference this year. With a new administration set to transition into place in January and multiple new initiatives starting at both the state and federal levels, the topic has never been more important.  The session, which will take place Wednesday, October 26 at 1:30 pm ET,  will feature some of the foremost experts in the world. The panel will be moderated by OpenDataSoft's Open Data Evangelist, Jason Hare. Topics to be discussed will include: The New Open Data Transition Report Future opportunities for Open Data at the local and federal levels with the DATA Act How the Open Data landscape is evolving, particularly through Demand Driven Open Data (DDOD) Future opportunities in open data at the Federal and local levels How the panel’s insights can...