We Need a Machine-Readable Federal Government Organization Chart
Jim Harper
Why Have a Machine-Readable Federal Government Organization Chart?
When I write and talk about getting better data about the federal government, its activities, and spending, I mostly have in mind strengthening public oversight by bringing computers to bear on the problem. You don’t have to know much about transparency, organizational management, or computing to understand that having a machine-readable government organization chart is an important start.
There should be a list, that computers can process, showing what agencies, bureaus, programs, and projects exist in the federal government and how they are related. Then budgets, bills in Congress, spending programs and actual outlays, regulations, guidance documents, and much more could be automatically tied to the federal organizational units affected and involved.
But it’s not only public oversight that would benefit from such a list.
Mike Riggs at Reason magazine has found that the Office of Management and Budget’s sequestration report issued last September listed a cut to the National Drug Intelligence Center’s budget even though the NDIC went out of business last June.
The first line item on page 121 of the OMB’s September 2012 report says that under sequestration the National Drug Intelligence Center would lose $2 million of its $20 million budget. While that’s slightly more than 8.2 percent (rounding error or scare tactic?), the bigger problem is that the National Drug Intelligence Center shuttered its doors on June 15, 2012–three months before the OMB issued its report to Congress.
That’s embarrassing for the administration, as it should be. Riggs asks, “Might there be other errors in the OMB’s report?”
Getting organized is not just about public oversight. Another reason to have a machine-readable federal government organization chart is to improve internal management and controls. This kind of mistake should be nearly impossible. People at OMB should be able to download the list of government entities at any time, day or night, and be sure that it is the correct listing that uniquely identifies and distinguishes all the organizational units of the federal government at that moment. We should be able to download it, too.
Unfortunately, OMB controller Danny Werfel has been riding the brake on transparency. He and the Obama administration as a whole should be stepping on the gas. In early February, the Sunlight Foundation found that more than $1.5 trillion in federal spending for fiscal year 2011 was misreported on USASpending.gov.
Greg Elin
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Raymond Yee
Greg:� is the work you and Josh Tauberer have done on this front publicly available?
-Raymond
On 2/26/13 7:10 AM, Greg Elin wrote:
Jim,
You know Josh Tauberer and I began some work on this last summer. It was less of an organization chart as it was a machine readable list of government organizations. It is a project the CIO Council's Information Sharing Subcommittee has also been looking at.
Greg Elin
On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Jim Harper <jim.h...@gmail.com> wrote:
...sequestration edition...�
(Wanna pass the word? RT this! https://twitter.com/Jim_Harper/status/306405787553636352)
February 25, 2013 6:27PMWhy Have a Machine-Readable Federal Government Organization Chart?
By
When I write and talk about getting better data about the federal government, its activities, and spending, I mostly have in mind strengthening public oversight by bringing computers to bear on the problem. You don�t have to know much about transparency, organizational management, or computing to understand that having a machine-readable government organization chart is an important start.
There should be a list, that computers can process, showing what agencies, bureaus, programs, and projects exist in the federal government and how they are related. Then budgets, bills in Congress, spending programs and actual outlays, regulations, guidance documents, and much more could be automatically tied to the federal organizational units affected and involved.
But it�s not only public oversight that would benefit from such a list.
Mike Riggs at Reason magazine has found that the Office of Management and Budget�s sequestration report issued last September listed a cut to the National Drug Intelligence Center�s budget even though the NDIC went out of business last June.
The first line item on page 121 of the OMB�s September 2012 report says that under sequestration the National Drug Intelligence Center would lose $2 million of its $20 million budget. While that�s slightly more than 8.2 percent (rounding error or scare tactic?), the bigger problem is that the National Drug Intelligence Center shuttered its doors on June 15, 2012�three months before the OMB issued its report to Congress.
That�s embarrassing for the administration, as it should be. Riggs asks, �Might there be other errors in the OMB�s report?�
Getting organized is not just about public oversight. Another reason to have a machine-readable federal government organization chart is to improve internal management and controls. This kind of mistake should be nearly impossible. People at OMB should be able to download the list of government entities at any time, day or night, and be sure that it is the correct listing that uniquely identifies and distinguishes all the organizational units of the federal government at that moment. We should be able to download it, too.
Unfortunately, OMB controller Danny Werfel has been riding the brake on transparency. He and the Obama administration as a whole should be stepping on the gas. In early February, the Sunlight Foundation found that more than $1.5 trillion in federal spending for fiscal year 2011 was misreported on USASpending.gov.
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�
�
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�
�
Pito Salas
I've been chatting with Jim on twitter about this: https://twitter.com/Jim_Harper/status/306405787553636352 and I pointed to very outside, preliminary work I did on this front in 2009: http://blog.dataunbound.com/2009/06/18/a-first-pass-at-an-org-chart-for-the-us-federal-government/
Greg: is the work you and Josh Tauberer have done on this front publicly available?
-Raymond
On 2/26/13 7:10 AM, Greg Elin wrote:
Jim,
You know Josh Tauberer and I began some work on this last summer. It was less of an organization chart as it was a machine readable list of government organizations. It is a project the CIO Council's Information Sharing Subcommittee has also been looking at.
Greg Elin
On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Jim Harper <jim.h...@gmail.com> wrote:
...sequestration edition...
(Wanna pass the word? RT this! https://twitter.com/Jim_Harper/status/306405787553636352)
February 25, 2013 6:27PMWhy Have a Machine-Readable Federal Government Organization Chart?
By
When I write and talk about getting better data about the federal government, its activities, and spending, I mostly have in mind strengthening public oversight by bringing computers to bear on the problem. You don’t have to know much about transparency, organizational management, or computing to understand that having a machine-readable government organization chart is an important start.
There should be a list, that computers can process, showing what agencies, bureaus, programs, and projects exist in the federal government and how they are related. Then budgets, bills in Congress, spending programs and actual outlays, regulations, guidance documents, and much more could be automatically tied to the federal organizational units affected and involved.
But it’s not only public oversight that would benefit from such a list.
Mike Riggs at Reason magazine has found that the Office of Management and Budget’s sequestration report issued last September listed a cut to the National Drug Intelligence Center’s budget even though the NDIC went out of business last June.
The first line item on page 121 of the OMB’s September 2012 report says that under sequestration the National Drug Intelligence Center would lose $2 million of its $20 million budget. While that’s slightly more than 8.2 percent (rounding error or scare tactic?), the bigger problem is that the National Drug Intelligence Center shuttered its doors on June 15, 2012–three months before the OMB issued its report to Congress.
That’s embarrassing for the administration, as it should be. Riggs asks, “Might there be other errors in the OMB’s report?”
Getting organized is not just about public oversight. Another reason to have a machine-readable federal government organization chart is to improve internal management and controls. This kind of mistake should be nearly impossible. People at OMB should be able to download the list of government entities at any time, day or night, and be sure that it is the correct listing that uniquely identifies and distinguishes all the organizational units of the federal government at that moment. We should be able to download it, too.
Unfortunately, OMB controller Danny Werfel has been riding the brake on transparency. He and the Obama administration as a whole should be stepping on the gas. In early February, the Sunlight Foundation found that more than $1.5 trillion in federal spending for fiscal year 2011 was misreported on USASpending.gov.
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Josh Tauberer
Some preliminary work I did on this now lives here:
https://github.com/unitedstates/orgchart
I collected the data for HHS manually, as a proof of concept.
The dictionary keys like "cms" correspond with the "author_id" field used on healthdata.gov, if you prepend " http://healthdata.gov/id/agency/" to it to make a URI, e.g. here:
http://hub.healthdata.gov/dataset/2008-2010-data-entrepreneurs
The idea being that you could find the relevant datasets for a particular agency through some authoritative naming scheme.
(The files in the git repo are in YAML format, which is what we (+Eric Mill, Derek Willis, et al) are using for other projects in the unitedstates org on github. When Greg and I last spoke about it it was a more semantic-webby idea.)
- Josh Tauberer (@JoshData) http://razor.occams.info
I've been chatting with Jim on twitter about this: https://twitter.com/Jim_Harper/status/306405787553636352 and I pointed to very outside, preliminary work I did on this front in 2009: http://blog.dataunbound.com/2009/06/18/a-first-pass-at-an-org-chart-for-the-us-federal-government/
Greg: is the work you and Josh Tauberer have done on this front publicly available?
-Raymond
On 2/26/13 7:10 AM, Greg Elin wrote:
Jim,
You know Josh Tauberer and I began some work on this last summer. It was less of an organization chart as it was a machine readable list of government organizations. It is a project the CIO Council's Information Sharing Subcommittee has also been looking at.
Greg Elin
On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Jim Harper <jim.h...@gmail.com> wrote:
...sequestration edition...
(Wanna pass the word? RT this! https://twitter.com/Jim_Harper/status/306405787553636352)
February 25, 2013 6:27PMWhy Have a Machine-Readable Federal Government Organization Chart?
By
When I write and talk about getting better data about the federal government, its activities, and spending, I mostly have in mind strengthening public oversight by bringing computers to bear on the problem. You don’t have to know much about transparency, organizational management, or computing to understand that having a machine-readable government organization chart is an important start.
There should be a list, that computers can process, showing what agencies, bureaus, programs, and projects exist in the federal government and how they are related. Then budgets, bills in Congress, spending programs and actual outlays, regulations, guidance documents, and much more could be automatically tied to the federal organizational units affected and involved.
But it’s not only public oversight that would benefit from such a list.
Mike Riggs at Reason magazine has found that the Office of Management and Budget’s sequestration report issued last September listed a cut to the National Drug Intelligence Center’s budget even though the NDIC went out of business last June.
The first line item on page 121 of the OMB’s September 2012 report says that under sequestration the National Drug Intelligence Center would lose $2 million of its $20 million budget. While that’s slightly more than 8.2 percent (rounding error or scare tactic?), the bigger problem is that the National Drug Intelligence Center shuttered its doors on June 15, 2012–three months before the OMB issued its report to Congress.
That’s embarrassing for the administration, as it should be. Riggs asks, “Might there be other errors in the OMB’s report?”
Getting organized is not just about public oversight. Another reason to have a machine-readable federal government organization chart is to improve internal management and controls. This kind of mistake should be nearly impossible. People at OMB should be able to download the list of government entities at any time, day or night, and be sure that it is the correct listing that uniquely identifies and distinguishes all the organizational units of the federal government at that moment. We should be able to download it, too.
Unfortunately, OMB controller Danny Werfel has been riding the brake on transparency. He and the Obama administration as a whole should be stepping on the gas. In early February, the Sunlight Foundation found that more than $1.5 trillion in federal spending for fiscal year 2011 was misreported on USASpending.gov.
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Greg Elin
Sent from my iPhonerg
I've been chatting with Jim on twitter about this: https://twitter.com/Jim_Harper/status/306405787553636352 and I pointed to very outside, preliminary work I did on this front in 2009: http://blog.dataunbound.com/2009/06/18/a-first-pass-at-an-org-chart-for-the-us-federal-government/
Greg: is the work you and Josh Tauberer have done on this front publicly available?
-Raymond
On 2/26/13 7:10 AM, Greg Elin wrote:
Jim,
You know Josh Tauberer and I began some work on this last summer. It was less of an organization chart as it was a machine readable list of government organizations. It is a project the CIO Council's Information Sharing Subcommittee has also been looking at.
Greg Elin
On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Jim Harper <jim.h...@gmail.com> wrote:
...sequestration edition...
(Wanna pass the word? RT this! https://twitter.com/Jim_Harper/status/306405787553636352)
February 25, 2013 6:27PMWhy Have a Machine-Readable Federal Government Organization Chart?
By
When I write and talk about getting better data about the federal government, its activities, and spending, I mostly have in mind strengthening public oversight by bringing computers to bear on the problem. You don’t have to know much about transparency, organizational management, or computing to understand that having a machine-readable government organization chart is an important start.
There should be a list, that computers can process, showing what agencies, bureaus, programs, and projects exist in the federal government and how they are related. Then budgets, bills in Congress, spending programs and actual outlays, regulations, guidance documents, and much more could be automatically tied to the federal organizational units affected and involved.
But it’s not only public oversight that would benefit from such a list.
Mike Riggs at Reason magazine has found that the Office of Management and Budget’s sequestration report issued last September listed a cut to the National Drug Intelligence Center’s budget even though the NDIC went out of business last June.
The first line item on page 121 of the OMB’s September 2012 report says that under sequestration the National Drug Intelligence Center would lose $2 million of its $20 million budget. While that’s slightly more than 8.2 percent (rounding error or scare tactic?), the bigger problem is that the National Drug Intelligence Center shuttered its doors on June 15, 2012–three months before the OMB issued its report to Congress.
That’s embarrassing for the administration, as it should be. Riggs asks, “Might there be other errors in the OMB’s report?”
Getting organized is not just about public oversight. Another reason to have a machine-readable federal government organization chart is to improve internal management and controls. This kind of mistake should be nearly impossible. People at OMB should be able to download the list of government entities at any time, day or night, and be sure that it is the correct listing that uniquely identifies and distinguishes all the organizational units of the federal government at that moment. We should be able to download it, too.
Unfortunately, OMB controller Danny Werfel has been riding the brake on transparency. He and the Obama administration as a whole should be stepping on the gas. In early February, the Sunlight Foundation found that more than $1.5 trillion in federal spending for fiscal year 2011 was misreported on USASpending.gov.
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Gregory Slater
Gregory Slater
Even if it never reaches fruition, it's an experiment. It's a springboard to studying the nature of GigaGov - of bureaucracy at the larges scale - as a creature. does it even make sense to have governments this large? It could serve as a platform for looking at what our gov has evolved into since the days of the guys in tights…On Feb 26, 2013, at 8:35 AM, Gregory Slater wrote:importantly, the api for contributing records should be very easy to use, so that it requires a slittle effort as possible.each worker in gov is invited to provide their own connectivity diagram from their on locus.contradictory data is inevitable (not only from the fallibility of contributors, but organizations have actual conflicts and uncertainties and ambiguities in their structuresthe ontology must record and characterize thiseven the attempt to characterize the insanity of the beast is attractive
Gregory Slater
Gregory Slater
Eric Mill
Daniel Schuman
Daniel
Daniel Schuman
Director | Advisory Committee on Transparency
Policy Counsel | The Sunlight Foundation
o: 202-742-1520 x 273 | c: 202-713-5795 | @danielschuman
