I have long suspected that mainstream news, with its terrorist attacks, high profile political disputes, etc., is a dangerous distraction. Here is one more brick to shore up that opinion.
Congress attempts giant leap backward on data transparency by Pam Baker.
From the post:
The new Republican Congress was incredibly busy on its first full day at work. 241 bills were introduced on that day and more than a few were highly controversial. While polarizing bills on abortion, Obamacare and immigration got all the media headlines, one very important Congressional action dipped beneath the radar: an attempt to eliminate data transparency in financial reporting.
The provision to the “Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act” would exempt nearly 60 percent of public companies from filing data-based reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the Data Transparency Coalition.
“This action will set the U.S. on a path backwards and put our financial regulators, public companies and investors at a significant disadvantage to global competitors. It is tremendously disappointing to see that one of the first actions of the new Congress is to put forward legislation that would harm American competitiveness and deal a major setback to data transparency in financial regulation,” said Hudson Hollister, the executive director of the Data Transparency Coalition, a trade association pursuing the publication of government information as standardized, machine-readable data.
See Pam’s post for some positive steps you can take with regard to this bill and how to remain informed about similar attempts in the future.
To be honest apparently the SEC is having all sorts of data management difficulties but given the success rate of government data projects, that’s not all that hard to believe. But the solution to such a problem isn’t to simply stop collecting information.
No doubt the SEC is locked into various custom/proprietary systems, but what if they opened up all the information about those systems for an open source project, say under the Apache Foundation, to integrate some specified data set into their systems?
It surely could not fare any worse than projects for which the government hires contractors.