Socrata

If you didn’t see today’s announcement on the White House blog or on the Huffington Post, the White House has released a list of recent White House visitors. I think Norm Eisen from the White House blog says it best:

“Today marks a major milestone in government transparency — and an important lesson in the unintended consequences of such vigorous disclosure.

We previously announced that the White House in December of this year would — for the first time in history — begin posting all White House visitor records under the terms of our new voluntary disclosure policy. As part of that initiative, we also offered to look back at the records created before the announcement of the policy and answer specific requests for visitor records created earlier in the year.

So far we’ve processed 110 disclosure requests from September that yielded nearly 500 visitor records. All of these are now available on the White House website in accessible, searchable format for anyone to browse or download. Consistent with our earlier announcement that we will only release records 90 days or older, this first batch covers the period of time between January 20, 2009 to July 31, 2009. Future batches will be posted on an ongoing basis.”

Kudos to the White House team!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.