Freedom of Information

One of of the goals I had for OpenMissouri, when I started the project as a 2010-2011 fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, was to provide inspiration and tools to journalism and open-government groups in other locales that want to deploy data catalogs of their own.

My RJI fellowship is officially over, but the OpenMissouri.org team has been making strides since we launched the site March 17 at Open Missouri Day during Sunshine Week.

The first, former and only Chief Information Officer of the United States talks about transparency, taxpayer savings, and the battle for the soul of journalism.

David Herzog, 2010-2011 Fellow

We launched OpenMissouri.org as part of my RJI fellowship on March 17, during Sunshine Week. We had 135 data sets from nearly 20 state government agencies listed on the site at kickoff.

Since then, we’ve hit nearly 150 data sets and are continuing to add features (data file sharing and Sunshine letter generator) and otherwise tweak the site.

I’ve learned some great lessons this fellowship year by tapping into the wisdom of my fellow RJI fellows and Columbia developer Jamie Stephens, and from reading “Getting Real,” a book from 37signals, a web software company.

Here are some of those lessons, in no particular order

David Herzog, 2010-2011 Fellow

More than 40 journalists, librarians, information professionals, citizens, students and consultants have signed up so far for Open Missouri Day March 17 at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.

David Herzog, 2010-2011 Fellow

Here’s some exciting news: We’ve started developing the Open Missouri website and are shooting to launch in February.

Our goal is to make it a community for journalists, citizens, web application developers and business people who want to know about the wealth of data that state and local government agencies here in Missouri collect in computerized form and store offline. (Some examples: suspended school teachers, disciplined doctors and amusement ride inspections).

David Herzog, 2010-2011 Fellow

Mizzou J-School master's students who are working on the project will be stepping up their efforts to collect inventories of databases held offline by state government agencies.

How's that going, you ask? It depends on the agency.

Some, such as the Missouri Ethics Commission, have happily told us about the public data they collect. So give them a  gold star for openness; the commission clearly gets its obligation to the public. Gold stars go to the departments of Conservation and Natural Resources; both of them provided detailed information in the spring, during a pre-Open Missouri pilot run.