Search Open MissouriOne of my favorite holiday traditions comes when I visit my sister’s family. My sister, who has two grown kids of her own, lines my teenage son against the wall in her kitchen. Then she grabs a pencil and marks a spot to show how my son has grown. For anyone who has watched kids sprout, it’s a pretty amazing experience.
In that spirit, I thought it would be great to give OpenMissouri a chart of its own to show you how much we’ve blossomed since our launch on March 17, 2011 during Sunshine Week.
You can see that we nearly doubled the number data sets that we’ve cataloged on the site. Definitely great news. However, as I mentioned before, we still have a lot of work to do, because 10 out of 19 state agencies have failed to provide full information.
Other accomplishments since launch include:
- Adding a Sunshine request letter generator for registered site users
- Allowing registered site users to share sample data sets that they’ve obtained
- Letting anyone download sample data with one click
- Releasing the OpenMissouri data catalog software as an open-source project on GitHub. Developers can contribute to the software code. Groups in other locales can use the free code to host their own sites.
- Reporting more in depth about U.S. newspaper journalists use of data on government web sites.
It’s been a busy and productive year. I’ll look ahead into plans for 2012 another time soon.
–David Herzog, OpenMissouri founder
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
My note of alarm is the devil hidden in the tieadl. Health data is by and large *not* public data. Having personal access to my medical file on line, regardless of whether I think that’s a good idea (for the record I don’t), is not an Open Data issue in anyway. Are we seeing the early stepping stones being laid to later claim that huge investment into another NHS farce was in fact what they meant by supporting on Open Data Initiative?As you say I think on the whole very positive, but the inclusion of personal access to medical history looks really incongruous amongst the other examples.