How Unique is the New U.S. Open Data Policy? - Sunlight Foundation Blog

"The White House’s new Executive Order may be significantly different than the open data policies that have come before it on the federal level, but where does it stand in a global -- and local -- context? Many folks have already jumped at the chance to compare this new US executive order and the new policies that accompany it to a similar public letter issued by UK Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010, but little attention has been paid to one of the new policy’s most substantial provisions: the creation of a public listing of agency data based on an internal audits of information holdings. As administrative as this provision might sound, the creation of this listing (and the accompanying scoping of what information isn’t yet public, but could be released) is part of the next evolution of open data policies (and something Sunlight has long called for as a best practice). So does this policy put the U.S. on the leading edge? Yes. Sort of. It’s hard to discern the entire landscape of policies dealing with data indexes: The new U.S. policy certainly appears to be the strongest index and audit requirement we’ve found, though policies from the city of San Francisco and government agencies in Wales and the United Kingdom (all explored in more detail below) are close contenders. The Welsh and UK agency examples are particularly strong as they are not only evidence of good policy but good implementation: You can find the inventories fully released for each of these government bodies here and here. Over the next few months we will start to see how well the approaches of San Francisco and the U.S. federal government perform at bringing similar practices to a much broader scale ..."