I wrote here a few weeks ago about the “high-value data sets” — three per agency — that the federal government would soon be releasing at Data.gov. They were released on January 22nd, and we’ve been poring over them ever since. More on that below.
Tomorrow, agencies are supposed to have their “open government” sites put up — sites where they make their data feeds available and easily findable for the public. There are a couple of different sites monitoring when those sites are going up.
Data, data, data — that means more direct oversight of the government by more people. We talked about all this at our December 2008 policy forum, Just Give Us the Data!
When I wrote recently about the release of agencies’ high-value data sets, though, I worried:
Rather than substantive insight into government management, deliberations, and results, we might get a lot of data-oriented play-toys… [P]ublic choice economics predicts that the agencies will choose the data feeds with the greatest likelihood of increasing their discretionary budgets or the least likelihood of shrinking them.
So I decided to grade them:
To help focus agencies on releasing the data that is high-value for genuine government transparency, I plan to examine the three data-streams each agency releases and grade the agencies on whether their releases provide insight into agency management, deliberations, or results.
With the help of Cato interns Solomon Stein and Sasha Davydenko, I assigned three points to each feed that had to do with management, deliberation, or results. The resulting numerical scores — 9, 6, 3, or 0 — translate into grades: A, B, C, or D respectively. F was reserved for agencies that didn’t produce feeds.
The results follow these few comments: