The challenge
As noted in Open Data Stories’ first story, there are calls from various quarters for more data on the utility of governments releasing data and other material for re-use.
The challenge would seem to be this: if people and organisations want governments to continue to invest in open data initiatives, they should jump into the feedback loop and tell governments, and the world, when they are putting open government data to good use. The scale or nature of beneficial use shouldn’t matter. It might be economic, creative, cultural or environmental. Or it could be something else. But tell us your story. Equally, interested stakeholders such as Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation can tell us their stories too, even if that is only drawing us to relevant (and openly licensed ) articles that we can repost on Open Data Stories. And, of course, agencies who see the data they steward being put to good use should tell us too.
Whatever the case, share your stories with others. The more you do, the richer the feedback loop and that, in turn, is likely to enable open data policies to be better developed and refined and, ultimately, to be sustainable.
Tom Johnson on 02 Nov 12Document mining shows Paul Ryan relying on the the programs he criticizes by Jonathan Stray on 11/02/2012 0 One of the jobs of a journalist is to check the record. When Congressman Paul Ryan became a vice-presidential candidate, Associated Press reporter Jack Gillum decided to examine the candidate through his own words. Hundreds of Freedom of Information requests and 9,000 pages later, Gillum wrote a story showing that Ryan has asked for money from many of the same Federal programs he has criticized as wasteful, including stimulus money and funding for alternative fuels. This would have been much more difficult without special software for journalism. In this case Gillum relied on two tools: DocumentCloud to upload, OCR, and search the documents, and Overview to automatically sort the documents into topics and visualize the contents. Both projects are previous Knight News Challenge winners. But first Gillum had to get the documents. As a member of Congress, Ryan isn't subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, Gillum went to every federal agency - whose files are covered under FOIA - for copies of letters or emails that might identify Ryan's favored causes, names of any constituents who sought favors, and more. Bit by bit, the documents arrived - on paper. The stack grew over weeks, eventually piling up two feet high on Gillum's desk. Then he scanned the pages and loaded them into the AP's internal installation of DocumentCloud. The software converts the scanned pages to searchable text, but there were still 9000 pages of material. That's where Overview came in. Developed in house at the Associated Press, this open-source visualization tool processes the full text of each document and clusters similar documents together, producing a visualization that graphically shows the contents of the complete document set. "I used Overview to take these 9000 pages of documents, and knowing there was probably going to be a lot of garbage or ext