This suggestion was forwarded here in reference to this blog post.
Lobbying and Influence
Modernize Foreign Agents Registration Act Data Collections and Reporting
Reporting practices for lobbyists for foreign entities desperately needs modernization, as we have described in this letter and has been the subject of congressional hearings. The FARA database still permits registrants to submit paper documents and it publishes those documents as PDFs. This obscures the useful information contained in the reports. Transparency advocates spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to transform these paper files into a searchable, sortable, downloadable database.
As part of its third Open Government Plan, the Department of Justice committed “to review the FARA website and electronic filing system, while soliciting reasonable and concrete suggestions and feedback from the public, and will work to make feasible and appropriate modifications to the database. Throughout this process, the Department will specifically investigate collecting and publishing registration information as structured data in a machine-readable format.”
It is time to require collection and publication of registration information as structured data. The Department of Justice should require all filings be made in an electronic format where the information can easily flow into a machine-processable digital format. In turn, that information should be released to the public in bulk as structured data so that the data it contains may be searched and sorted. To the extent the Justice Department has already transformed the information contained in the filings into an electronic database, that information should be published as well. Until filings are required in electronic formats, the Justice Department should publish data from all future FARA filings in bulk in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format. (We know it is possible.)
This suggestion was forwarded here in reference to this blog post.
Lobbying and Influence
Modernize Foreign Agents Registration Act Data Collections and Reporting
Reporting practices for lobbyists for foreign entities desperately needs modernization, as we have described in this letter and has been the subject of congressional hearings. The FARA database still permits registrants to submit paper documents and it publishes those documents as PDFs. This obscures the useful information contained in the reports. Transparency advocates spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to transform these paper files into a searchable, sortable, downloadable database.
As part of its third Open Government Plan, the Department of Justice committed “to review the FARA website and electronic filing system, while soliciting reasonable and concrete suggestions and feedback from the public, and will work to make feasible and appropriate modifications to the database. Throughout this process, the Department will specifically investigate collecting and publishing registration information as structured data in a machine-readable format.”
It is time to require collection and publication of registration information as structured data. The Department of Justice should require all filings be made in an electronic format where the information can easily flow into a machine-processable digital format. In turn, that information should be released to the public in bulk as structured data so that the data it contains may be searched and sorted. To the extent the Justice Department has already transformed the information contained in the filings into an electronic database, that information should be published as well. Until filings are required in electronic formats, the Justice Department should publish data from all future FARA filings in bulk in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format. (We know it is possible.)