Federal agencies have made significant progress on open data, but the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has not issued implementation guidance or performance reports under the OPEN Government Data Act, according to a report released today by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). […]

For agencies pursuing new ways to share and manage data, Government Accountability Office (GAO) Director of IT and Cybersecurity Nick Marinos recommends focusing on the agency’s mission and incorporating security early on in the process. […]

Formalizing the roles of Federal agency chief data officers (CDO) – a relatively new position for many Federal agencies – is well underway but still far from finished, two agency CDOs indicated on Sept. 16 at the Professional Services Council’s Tech Trends Conference. […]

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) CTO Ed Simcox said at MeriTalk’s Cloud Connect 2019 event today that HHS has melded its IT principles with cloud and data analytics capabilities to develop an application program interface (API) that gives citizens power over their healthcare data. […]

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a memo on implementing the first phase of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, including deadlines for naming agency chief data officers (CDO), creating data governance bodies, and developing learning agendas. […]

The move by government organizations to public cloud infrastructure is often motivated by a desire to provide better services to citizens, but an academic piece warns about the need to maintain public access to open data in the cloud. […]

The State of The Union of Open Data, a report released by the Data Foundation on Wednesday, finds widespread agreement that progress is being made across a variety of organizations on data standardization, data sharing, and data usage. […]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced the launch of an interactive data tool to display substance abuse data along with other public information, allowing local leaders to “build grassroots strategies to address the opioid epidemic,” the department said in its announcement. […]

The Federal government is finding new ways to make Federal spending data more transparent to citizens by launching the Treasury Department’s Data Lab, and considering a bill that would add open data requirements to Federal grants. […]

Bernard Barton, chief information officer of the Library of Congress, is challenging American coders to bring the centuries-old information stored by the library into the digital era. The challenge, which will launch later this year, asks coders to submit ideas for modernizing the public’s access to the Library of Congress’ data. […]

The Center for Data Innovation, along with 82 other civil society organizations, signed a letter on April 5 urging Congress to act on the Open, Permanent, Electronic, and Necessary Government Data Act, which would establish a policy requiring Federal agencies to ensure that their data is accessible to the public. […]

The U.S. Forest Service’s Visitor Map 2.0, an open data platform informing people what services national forests have to offer, received 22,000 unique page views during the month of February. […]

Gregory Reams, leader of the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis program, said that the open data sets his office makes available are unlikely to suffer the same fate as the animal welfare documents that disappeared from the Department of Agriculture website. “It’s been supported for 80 years and used by a wide constituency,” Reams said at Esri’s FedGIS conference. […]

Open data supporters have expressed trepidation over a new House bill that states Federal agencies will no longer be able to use geospatial information to create open databases on racial disparities and affordable housing. […]

Through a new open data project, the Department of Defense will make information on the Korean War publicly available for the first time on Dec. 19, and the Air Force major who helped design the portal said he looks forward to what civilians will do with this data. […]

Ninety percent of policymakers, open data experts, and private sector leaders believe that the standardization and publication of government data relating to their field has improved to at least some extent over the last few years, according a report from the Data Foundation and Grant Thornton. […]

The National Technical Information Service named data.world, a social network for people interested in working with data, as one of 35 organizations announced as partners for its Joint Venture Partnership program. […]

Quick transitions of teams make for a relatively seamless administrative shift, according to Max Stier, president and chief executive officer of the Partnership for Public Service, which offers recommendations for capitalizing on the potential of open data, no matter who takes the Oval Office in January. […]

Worldwide, 800 million people suffer from starvation every day, according to a blog post from the U. S. Department of Agriculture website. With the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition Summit, USDA plans to address this problem. […]

The White House launched its “Opportunity Project,” an open-data program that partners with public and private organizations and provides information about access to opportunity in cities across America. The aim: to provide all Americans with access to as many opportunities as possible, regardless of social or financial status. […]

The White House is threatening to veto HR 1675 if it passes the Senate, after the House of Representatives passed the Small Company Disclosure Simplification Act that would not require most U.S. companies to file machine-readable financial statements. […]

The Data Transparency Coalition is changing its name to Data Coalition and opening a new research center as it gathers steam to push to standardize and publish all government information as open data. […]