See: http://bit.ly/techprezfoiopendata
NY Study Shows How Freedom of Information Can Inform Open Data BY MIRANDA NEUBAUER | Thursday, August 14 2014 On New York State's open data portal, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation has around 40 data resources of varying sizes, such as maps of lakes and ponds and rivers, bird conservation areas and hiking trails. But those datasets do not include several data resources that are most sought after by many New York businesses, a new study from advocacy group Reinvent Albany has found. Welcome to a little-discussed corner of so-called "open government"--while agencies often pay lip service to the cause, the data they actually release is sometimes nowhere close to what is most wanted. Reinvent Albany used the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) process to obtain the logs of the nearly 4,000 FOIL requests to the agency in 2013, and found that half a dozen datasets were the subject of fifty percent of all requests, including "two specific datasets about oil spills [that] aren't online anywhere," explained Dominic Mauro, staff attorney for the group, in a recent interview. Since the FOIL logs contain information about who is requesting them, Reinvent Albany was able to take a closer look at the interests of those requesting information. Full Article: http://bit.ly/techprezfoiopendata ᐧ ----------------------------------------- Group home for Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire: http://groups.dowire.org/groups/newswire Replies go to members of Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire with all posts on this topic here: http://groups.dowire.org/r/topic/KJ2YIFeeJy8iUpqqMyQno For digest version or to leave Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire, email [email protected] with "digest on" or "unsubscribe" in the *subject*. Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire is hosted by Democracies Online - http://dowire.org.
