The Senate in a Saturday session unanimously approved the Open Government Data Act designed to require agencies—including the Government Accountability Office and the Federal Election Commission—to routinely publish their data in non-proprietary machine-readable formats.
The bill (S. 2852), introduced by Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, would make publishing open data an official responsibility of the federal government, codifying the requirement in a 2013 executive order from President Obama that all government data be “open by default.”
