The White House today announced Ethics.gov, a portal the Obama administration is using to consolidate several sets of data related to elections or influence all in one place. This takes several datasets that were previously more difficult to get to and makes them more accessible and easier to use. Firstly, people who may not have known about these data now do, and have a chance to see what each dataset includes. The Sunlight Foundation's John Wonderlich writes, "... the President is acknowledging the role of public oversight, and asserting that the President has a responsibility to create meaningful online disclosure of ethics and influence information. That's a new role for the President, and one we're glad to see the White House struggling through, especially because it's a role Sunlight has tried to play as much as possible." Read More

In a paper published earlier this week, Harlan Yu and David G. Robinson assert that the phrase "open government," which used to mean government transparency — as in, revealing the internal functions and decision-making of government — has come to also mean increasing access to data that may not have anything to do at all with transparency. Read More

As expected, the New York City Council on Wednesday voted unanimously to approve a landmark piece of legislation that would require its 50 plus agencies to publish their quantitive data sets through an online portal in a machine-readable format, enabling public and private sector access to better manipulate and interpret the city's information. The bill as passed was crafted with the cooperation of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration and it's expected that the mayor will sign the legislation into law. Read More

Using the Sunlight Foundation's* Capitol Words API, independent analytics consultant Dan Kozikowski has put together a look at the vocabulary of each member of Congress and mapped the results on a Google map.

By his analysis, the most loquacious legislator in the House of Representatives is Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, who holds a bachelor's degree from Yale and a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law.

Kozikowski also looked for words said only once in Congress by members of each party since 1996, which is as far back as the data available through Sunlight goes. (Sunlight gets its data from the Congressional Record.)

The Associated Press' Kelli Kennedy reports that an expensive and newfangled computer system designed to prevent fraudulent Medicare payments has yielded disappointing results.

The congressionally mandated, $77 million system was built by Northrum Grumman and a group of other companies, Kennedy reports, and has yielded a savings of $7,591 so far after flagging 2,500 leads and 600 suspicious cases.

Tucked off to one side in the "supplemental materials" section of the White House's just-released federal budget is something called the Public Budget Database, a collection of data tables in machine-readable formats. An accompanying users' guide explains:

The data files provide sufficient detail to produce: (a) outlay totals by agency, subfunction, and Budget Enforcement Act category that are consistent with the totals presented in the 2013 Budget; (b) receipt totals by source, as shown in various published tables in the Budget; and (c) the deficit (on-budget, off-budget, and unified budget basis).

The New Hampshire state legislature recently passed a bill that makes open data and open source software included by default in the state's procurement process.

The bill, HB 418, requires government officials to consider open-source products when making new technology acquisitions and only purchase products that comply with open data standards. Last year, Nick Judd covered how the New Hampshire legislature changed with the addition of several “geeks” to the House of Representatives and the passage of this new legislation shows a growing culture of friendliness to the tech concept of “open” in the statehouse. It is currently on its way to the governor's desk for signing.