Open Data

I could not reach the site from Tor. The linked page is the archive.org cached version, which actually is open to all.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35371288

The regulator of banks at a state-level responded to reports of legal infringements by a credit union to say: “why don’t you change banks?” Of course the important question here is: “why don’t you enforce the law? Are banks above the law?”

I wanted to find out how many reports of unlawful conduct by banks in the state were reported and how many are acted on. So I requested disclosure of reports and remedies for a specific credit union.

They’re response: investigations and actions taken against banks are secret.

WTF? This is a public regulator. How is this even possible? To be clear, we pay taxes to finance this regulator of banks, yet we are blocked from seeing whether they do their job? And we are blocked from seeing complaints submitted by the public, thus blocked from taking self-defense measures to avoid bad actors?

Would it be sensible to have a non-profit host a searchable website that publishes people’s complaints before forwarding them to the secretive regulator?

The linked site apparently launched in 2013 to collect metrics on open data by govs around the world and rank them. Then what.. in 2015 they quit?

Did anyone pick up the slack? I would like to see how much rank the US would be losing under the GOP’s Trump regime.

Elon’s DOGE regime stormed into NOAA and demanded direct access to their IT systems to snoop on the data. This is in the name of cutting fat.

climate

Climate scientists worldwide rely on weather data from NOAA. Obviously the party of climate denial is no friend to climate science. They want to stamp out that particular segment of science.

abolition of environmental regs

The GOP also hates environmental regs because they prioritize big business over the environment. From the linked article:

“The organization [NOAA] cited impacts of cuts could include overfishing, increased imports of illegal or unethically sourced seafood, threats to endangered wildlife, and threats to life and property without its weather forecasting and data resources.”

DEI

Team GOP is also looking to stamp out diversity, equity, and inclusion. This article covers that angle of DOGE’s likely assault on NOAA.

privatization

Of course Musk is also looking for his personal business advantage and any maneuver using government power to increase Tesla and Space-X revenue. Any opportunities to kill off public spending on public resources create opportunities for his private corporate empire will not be overlooked.

I tagged it as “US/world” because even though the data comes from the US, and is threatened within the US, the whole world uses the data.

(edit) It was noticed on !science@mander.xyz (where I was about to cross-post):
https://mander.xyz/post/24567559

FYI France has this open data website... https://www.data.gouv.fr/en/datasets/

I have not been able to track down the Belgian open data law¹ but it seems in principle blocking both Tor users and archive.org from access to the address book of Chamber of Representatives would not be in line with the spirit of open data. They may not have the IT competency to serve Tor users but to treat archive.org like a malicious robot is to underachieve.

¹ I can only find an old archive of the goals of the open data policy (in French), but not the law:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160416034829/http://www.digitalbelgium.be/sites/default/files/content/FR_strategisch_dossier.pdf

The original link was from https://openknowledge.be/ which seems to be a stale website and an inactive project. It feels like open data got started in Belgium but then the ball was dropped.

(original post)

To reach the Belgian datasets of open data from Tor you must go through archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20241003145143/https://data.gov.be

And because the website is interactive and also not completely archived, I ultimately could not even browse through to see what data there is beyond the first page of databases. Thus not entirely “open”.

But the Brussels datasets are open to all.

I could not find the data I was looking for. That is, I wanted to know how many complaints are sent to the various different SPF regulators as well as ombuds people -- and very specifically how many complaints are ignored. Some offices produce annual reports but I have never seen an annual report that exposes the count of ignored complaints.

Anyway, the question I have is what section of legal code covers open data in Belgium?

And if you try to visit the archive¹, that’s also fucked.

Not sure who these people are.. maybe they are actually watchdogs in opposition to open data.

¹ https://web.archive.org/web/20240925081816/https://www.opendatawatch.com/