Obama Announces Open Data Policy With Executive Order 94
In an overdue but welcome move, President Obama today issued an executive order mandating "open and machine-readable data" for government-published information. Also, kodiaktau writes "In a move to make data more readily available, the United States of America has announced the Project Open Data and has chosen GitHub to host the content." Ars has a great article on the announced policy, but as you might expect, it comes with caveats, exceptions, sub-goals and committees; don't expect too much change per day, or assume you have a right to open data, exactly, in the eyes of the government, but — "subject to appropriations" — it sounds good on paper. (I'd like the next step to be requiring that all file formats used by the government be open source.)
Re:Only right use of an Executive Order I've seen (Score:4, Interesting)
Executive orders have been held to have force of law in US History except under two cases:
1. Congress passes a countervailing law with a veto-proof majority.
2. The Supreme Court invalidates the order as unconstitutional.
1952 was the first time (2) occurred.
There have been some pretty significant executive orders, including Jackson's specie circular requiring that payment for federal lands be done in gold or silver, and FDR order that the military round up Japanese and German Americans in military zones.
Harry Truman desegregated the military via executive order, and Eisenhower did the same for public schools by executive order.
George Bush's order to restrict access to presidential papers was equally controversial.
Re:Only right use of an Executive Order I've seen (Score:3, Interesting)
You would think a Republican-led Congress would be inclined to limit what a Democrat as President does.
But it turns out...they would rather just let him do whatever, so when their guy gets in, he also gets to do 'whatever'.
And vice versa.