Open Government Initiative to surface a useful data set

By The Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

While we were kicking around data sets we’d like to see from the new Open Government Initiative, our colleague Daniel Schuman found an actual list, buried in appendix two of the Open Government Progress Report to the American People that the Obama administration released today.

I couldn’t help but notice this data set:

11. Department of Housing and Urban Development: Tracking Quality of Federally-Assisted Rental Housing—The Real Estate Assessment Center conducts physical property inspections of public housing. HUD is releasing a full historical view of point-in-time property scores. Making these details available will enable researchers, advocacy groups, and the general public to 1) better understand the physical condition of the HUD-assisted housing stock, 2) hold providers accountable for housing quality, and 3) plan for future affordable housing needs.

Some months back, we started cooking up a project we’re calling the OFFGRID (Opaque and Flawed Federal Government Records, Information and Data) Catalog. We wanted to go fishing for agency data that’s hard to find, difficult to obtain, hard to use–and HUD’s inspection records were one of the first I wanted us to go after. Imagine identifying the worst public housing in America by location and owner, mapping it, running the names of the owners through campaign finance databases and lobbying records, mapping public housing stock against toxic release inventory data…it just seemed like there was a lot one could do with that information, if only one could get it from HUD.

From the perspective of a journalist, that’s what’s most impressive about the announcement today. Not having to devote the first six months of a project to fighting tooth and nail for access to data, but actually having it–going to a Web site and downloading it–would be a huge boon for reporters. Not a panacea–federal data takes time to work with and understand, can often be inaccurate, needs debugging–but the less time spent trying to acquire it means more time can be devoted to analyzing it.

The Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group is part of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based organization that uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable.