Advocate for Important Data Programs Congress and the Administration have reached a budget deal for FY2016 (and FY2017) that will increase the overall spending limit for non-defense discretionary programs by $25 billion for the fiscal year that started October 1st. The House and Senate Appropriations Committees must now revise the 12 annual funding bills, and Congress must enact them, before the temporary spending bill (Continuing Resolution) expires on December 11th.
This is an opportunity for APDU members to advocate to the House and Senate subcommittees in charge of funding for the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Bureau of Economic Analysis. The new budget framework provides additional resources for the appropriate committees in charge of these vital data programs (Commerce, State, Justice or equivalent in the House/Senate and Housing Education Labor Pensions or equivalent in the House/Senate). APDU?s friends at the Census Project are currently circulating a letter advocating for full ACS funding. Now would be a good time for your Senator or Congressman to hear about the importance of Census, BLS, and BEA funding.
News
SBA Reaping DATA Act Benefits A recent Data Transparency Breakfast introduced a standing room only crowd at PwC to front-line DATA Act implementers and provided a glimpse of the first-ever DATA Act visualization platform from a federal agency. Tim Gribben, deputy CFO at the Small Business Administration, explained how after his agency ?did the DATA Act? the SBA suddenly had new insight into its own grants system.
OMB Rolls Out Proposed A-130 Changes Federal technology managers’ go-to rulebook for computer and information security is woefully behind the times. The A-130 circular from the Office of Management and Budget got its most recent overhaul in November 2000, back in the days of dial-up Internet connections. The new A-130 centralizes a wide range of policy updates that have come down on acquisitions, cybersecurity, information governance, records management, open data and privacy — either administratively or in recent legislation.
How Zillow Uses Open Data In the mid-2000s, several online data firms began to integrate real estate data with national maps to make the data more accessible for consumers. Of these firms, Zillow was the most effective at attracting users by rapidly growing its database, thanks in large part to open data.
Advancing Open and Citizen-Centered Government The United States released its third Open Government National Action Plan, announcing more than 40 new or expanded initiatives to advance the President?s commitment to an open and citizen-centered government. The release is part of our membership in the Open Government Partnership ? launched by President Obama and seven other heads of state ? which in just 4 years has grown from 8 to now 66 countries.
New & Updated Data Sources
Introducing the Human Needs Index Official national poverty data have long been calculated using a single dimension: income. At best, income statistics provide only a hazy picture of the actual conditions facing the hungry, the homeless, the unemployed, and the underemployed. The Human Needs Index (HNI) introduces a new, multidimensional way to measure poverty and its effects. The key lies in the street-level knowledge of The Salvation Army, one of the country?s largest nonprofits delivering a safety net of services to those in need.
Partnering with Amazon Web Services on Big Data On October 27, 2015, Amazon Web Services announced the public release of NOAA?s Next-Generation Weather Radar, or NEXRAD, data for anyone to use. Through cooperative activities as a part of NOAA?s Big Data Project, the real-time feed and full historical archive of original resolution (Level II) NEXRAD data, from June 1991 to present, will be freely available through the company?s cloud infrastructure.
Visualization of the Week
Mapping the Future of Global Development Researchers at the Nature Conservancy, a conservation organization, have created a series of maps that illustrate how the world?s ecosystems will be affected by nine sectors of global development, such as agricultural expansion, use of fossil fuels, and mining. The researchers analyzed publicly available data to estimate the potential for each sector to expand, such as the amount of unexploited fossil fuels in an area or historical trends of urban expansion, and created a color-coded index to illustrate where this potential exists around the world. The Nature Conservancy created these maps to demonstrate how global development will increasingly expand into previously undisturbed ecosystems and to highlight the need for governments, businesses, and other conservation organizations to mitigate the potential damage this could cause.
Did you work on a great report that you want your colleagues to know about? Just email us and we?ll include it here.
Calls for Comment
APDU maintains a list of open calls for comment on proposed federal data collections. We periodically alert APDU members to newly added calls for comment. Over the last several weeks, calls for comment on the following proposed data collections were published in the Federal Register (with due date):
Census Bureau
Business and Professional Classification Report (December 4, 2015)
Business R&D and Innovation Survey (December 3, 2015)
Department of Defense
The GlobalNET Collection (December 29, 2015)
Department of Health and Human Services
DATA Act Sec. 5 ?Simplifying Federal Award Reporting? Grants Pilot (January 4, 2016)
Online Application Order Form for Products from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) (November 30, 2015)
Internal Revenue Service
Tipping Survey Study (January 4, 2016)
National Agricultural Statistics Service
Bee and Honey Survey (November 30, 2015)
November 5, 2015
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