{"id":360,"date":"2012-02-26T16:36:13","date_gmt":"2012-02-26T16:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/?p=360"},"modified":"2012-02-26T16:59:15","modified_gmt":"2012-02-26T16:59:15","slug":"go-gov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/?p=360","title":{"rendered":"go .gov!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2009 the US government (thanks to Obama) did a remarkable thing by releasing a ton (perhaps a Library of Congress worth of tons) of data:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/explore.data.gov\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Much of the data is in CSV\/JSON\/XLS\/etc formats. \u00a0The Seattle gov has done similar local data efforts, much through the same underlying architecture:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/data.seattle.gov\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Socrata seems to be behind a lot of the more open stuff:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/opendata.socrata.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

A few interesting visualizations of some of the data there as well.<\/p>\n

Quite a bit of data still seems to be behind artificial paywalls that add friction to the process – say… individual criminal records, birth, death, etc. stuff. \u00a0You – anyone on anyone else, as far as I can see – can get all that stuff, but you have to pay something like $10 or $20 per search; might have made sense in the old days, but why the artificial constraints now? \u00a0For instance, at fortress.wa.gov <\/a>(great name ;)), you can get criminal conviction records for others by:<\/p>\n

Going on-line by using\u00a0WATCH<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(Washington Access To Criminal History). This feature requires either a credit card or a pre-established account. A $10 fee is charged for each name search, regardless of the outcome of the results of the search.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oddly it’s not ten bucks per name, it’s ten clams a search, no matter how many hits you get (zero+). \u00a0Interestingly it also sez:<\/p>\n

Under the Criminal Records Privacy Act, conviction CHRI may be made public to anyone without restriction and without the consent of the subject of the record.<\/span><\/p>\n

So… I can get anything on anyone… and give it away to anyone… but I have to pay for it? \u00a0It’s government data, why…?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2009 the US government (thanks to Obama) did a remarkable thing by releasing a ton (perhaps a Library of Congress worth of tons) of data: http:\/\/explore.data.gov\/ Much of the data is in CSV\/JSON\/XLS\/etc formats. \u00a0The Seattle gov has done similar local data efforts, much through the same underlying architecture: http:\/\/data.seattle.gov\/ Socrata seems to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,80,19],"tags":[85,86,330,82,329,84,83],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data","category-government","category-philosophy","tag-almost-public","tag-big-data","tag-data","tag-freedom","tag-government","tag-records","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":362,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions\/362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}