By Marc Joffe
Sunlight Foundation
According to census figures, the U.S. has over 91,000 state and local governments. The vast majority of these institutions produce documents that affect the citizens they serve. While many individual governments offer document repositories and diligently respond to public records requests, disclosure is inconsistent and not standardized. This poses challenges for researchers who wish to compare multiple governments.
California Common Sense (CaCS), a think tank focused on data-driven policy analysis, encountered this problem and has devised an interesting solution. CaCS is collecting a large number of local government documents, storing the documents on the cloud and making them available to other researchers. The group is also encouraging governments, researchers and citizens to contribute additional documents for hosting on the CaCS cloud.
The CaCS Open Records Initiative (ORI) launched late last year and hosts government documents produced in all 50 states. CaCS initial focus is on government financial documents, especially budgets and audited financial statements (often known as CAFRs). Other areas of interest include actuarial reports from public employee pension systems, school performance data and information on prison populations. The initiative is currently hosting 71,000 documents, and CaCS expects this number to reach 150,000 by the end of 2015 as team members continue collecting documents from governments nationwide. PDF documents lacking embedded text are being run through an OCR process, so all posted documents should be keyword searchable.
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