Cities open up their data catalogs

I wanted to take today to spotlight Edward Vielmetti, a writer for Ann Arbor.com, work on FOIA’s. He’s one of our newest writers on Sunshine Review, but is very obviously experienced with everything-FOIA in Michigan.

He recently posted that Ann Arbor, along with cities like New York, DC, Vancouver, and San Francisco, have begun publishing data sets for criminal activity, line item transactions as well as map information. These are very important steps because it’ll allow the development of the transparency apps that Diana discussed.

More local government need to move forward to publish data sets like these. But what of of the data sets that won’t be published? We need a list of what forms, data sets, etc. are available to be requested by FOIA.