• MAY 7, 2014
• Open Data

Open data policies are quickly spreading across the country as a way for state and local governments to increase transparency, enhance efficiencies, improve service quality, and boost public participation. These policies encourage and, in their best iterations, require proactive disclosure of public information, putting data online for easy access and reuse. Open data policies update the old process of requiring people to ask for access to public records, bringing information sharing in line with the capabilities of current technology.

Last summer, we at the Sunlight Foundation counted fewer than 20 open data policies among states, cities, counties and towns across the country. Now, that number has increased to more than 30 -- and the number continues to rise.

We've been supporting the spread of these policies by assessing new developments and providing resources to aid and improve in-progress efforts at opening data. Our Open Data Policy Guidelines are one key resource in this process. The Guidelines, created in mid-2012, were first updated last summer. We continue to learn from our experiences assessing and aiding open data efforts across the country and, this year, we've updated the Guidelines again to reflect some of those lessons.

The Guidelines are not just ambitious — they are actionable.

The Guidelines are still structured in a way that aligns with the evolution of open data efforts, addressing questions about what data should be public, how to make data public, and how to implement policy. What's new is some of the organization and explanation of the provisions within those three categories. We believe these changes make the document stronger as a whole and can provide needed guidance for crafting robust open data policies.

One of the biggest changes is embedding the aspirational "open by default" provision in the framing language for the Guidelines as a whole. We've updated the first provision to spell out this idea in immediately actionable terms, advocating for proactive disclosure of public information. This still embodies the idea of open by default, capturing the principle that people should be able to find information online, where they are already looking for it, rather than having to make a request.

Some of the other major updates include new provisions about the process of prioritizing data for release, asking data managers to recommend language for citing datasets, providing appropriately varied formats for different data uses, and encouraging reuse by making data license-free.