Archives

For over four years, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization and the leadership of the House Financial Services Committee have been trying to pass a bill that would prevent the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from collecting searchable financial data from most public companies. Fortunately, it is probably never going to become law. But why are the biotech industry and the Financial Services Committee leadership so fixated on the Small Company Disclosure Simplification Act?

The White House has published a plan to transform federal grant reporting from disconnected documents into open, standardized data. We know the road will be long. If the federal grant system were one company, it would be, by far, the world's largest, with over $600 billion in annual revenue.

We’ve just released our 2018 Policy Agenda - our plan for the reforms that will turbocharge the data transformation this year.

As the Data Coalition celebrated its fifth birthday, our ambitious agenda had taken hold for U.S. federal spending information - and was on its way to transforming the rest of the federal information portfolio as well. Here’s a look at our biggest data reform stories of 2017 and a glimpse of what to expect next year.

A new procurement announcement from the General Services Administration (GSA) has confirmed that the U.S. federal government is seriously considering a new, open future for the way its contractors and grantees are identified. The end may be in sight for the status quo, in which one company holds a monopoly over contract and grant spending data.

On October 19th in Sacramento, our California Data Demo Day brought together more than 100 supporters of opening up the Golden State’s data, representing dozens of government agencies and tech companies. Grant Thornton, Xcential, and OpenGov made our event possible through their sponsorship. Our morning of speeches, panels, and live demonstrations celebrated the impacts of open data for California: transparency outside, efficiency inside.

Last week the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed its first expansion of open corporate data in nearly nine years. Here's where the new proposal came from, what it means, and why it matters.

The GSA has given Dun & Bradstreet, Inc., a monopoly over the code that identifiers every company that has, or seeks, a contract with the federal government. The tech industry is beginning to recognize that public contracting information shouldn’t be tracked using a proprietary system.

Last Thursday, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued its long-awaited report on reducing compliance burdens for recipients of federal grants and contracts. Its main recommendation is simple yet powerful: the federal government needs to adopt a standardized data structure for all the information that grantees must submit.

At the Data Coalition's fourth annual DATA Act Summit, we no longer had to point to the future and predict the ways open spending data would benefit government and society. The future had come and the benefits were all around us - a world of new ways to visualize, analyze, and automate information about how taxpayers’ money is used. But we are never going to do this again. Here is why.