The White House has published a new open government plan that recommends changes to data policy as well as fixes for some existing issues. This is the third version of the Open Government Plan and includes policies relevant to developers as well as state and local governments.
The plan update comes as part of the US’ membership in the Open Government Partnership, a consortium of 66 countries formed by President Obama and seven other heads of state four years ago. The goal of the Open Government Partnership is to work toward increasing the integrity and transparency of government.
The release of this plan coincides with the Open Government Partnership Summit taking place this week in Mexico City, where more than 2,000 open government reformers from member governments and civil society organizations are gathering.
The plan includes recommendations for deepening existing open data initiatives in all levels of government, and also lays out the US plan for meeting goals in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. CivSource has already reported on one of those goals – expanded digital identification.
State and local governments will see greater federal support of open data projects through this plan as well. One of the new policy prescriptions involves expanding available Federal services to the Open311 platform currently used by cities nationwide.
Developers will also see new datasets come online, including public information from the electronically filed tax forms of nonprofit and charitable organizations (990 forms) as open, machine-readable data.
The full text of the plan is available here.
