Obama Announces Open Data Policy With Executive Order

In an overdue but welcome move, President Obama today issued an executive order mandating "open and machine-readable data" for government-published information. Also, kodiaktau writes "In a move to make data more readily available, the United States of America has announced the Project Open Data and has chosen GitHub to host the content." Ars has a great article on the announced policy, but as you might expect, it comes with caveats, exceptions, sub-goals and committees; don't expect too much change per day, or assume you have a right to open data, exactly, in the eyes of the government, but — "subject to appropriations" — it sounds good on paper. (I'd like the next step to be requiring that all file formats used by the government be open source.)

Comments

Re:How about information on Benghazi, then?

[Mashiki]

Benghazi, is as much a scandal as whitewater was. The difference between the two is no one died in regards to whitewater. And of course, if you're getting you news from nbc, cbs or abc along with cnn the information presented comes down to "some reporting or none at all."