The Scoop

I wasn’t going to respond to Ellen Miller‘s comments on my previous post, mostly because I thought I had said what I wanted to. But now that O’Reilly has picked up on things, I figure it might be worth one last attempt on my part. Your experience, of course, may argue against that. Ellen writes: [...]

There’s been a bit of discussion lately in the open government community about how to assess federal government efforts at meaningful transparency. Of the stuff I’ve heard and read, I tend to come down on the side of Gunnar Hellekson, who writes that the Sunlight Foundation (a frequent and leading voice on transparency) has “dangerously [...]

When it first appeared I was really excited to see Show Us The Data, which gave visitors a chance to list and vote for their “Most Requested Documents” that should be more readily available from the federal government. Sure enough, there were plenty of strong choices for the top 10 list. And then people starting [...]

Alison Young of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution used salary and bonus data for Centers for Disease Control employees to find that the “employees receiving the most frequent large cash awards and performance bonuses are not scientists, but mostly budget analysts, accountants, computer experts and other administrative managers.” The paper used FOIA to obtain the records for [...]

Fred Kelly of the Charlotte Observer used local data to show that “roughly four of every five Section 8 residents are clustered in 10 ZIP codes already burdened with crime and blight. At the same time, affluent communities, including vast stretches of south Charlotte and areas near Lake Norman, have virtually no Section 8 tenants.” [...]