Asset Disclosure details in US Census

Open Data Index US City Census
1

It seems that none of the existing cities (eg, San Francisco, Anchorage, Sacramento, Louisville, etc) that say they have posted open Asset Disclosure data have met the description.

All contain top level employee’s salaries only.

http://us-city.census.okfn.org/dataset/asset-disclosure2

No other info on other top-level government officials, like investment information, prior and current business relationships, real estate interests, and personal income (including gifts and travel or speaking payments) is public. Also, I’m not sure what ‘top-level’ covers in the description, or if all this data should be disclosed for non-elected city officials.

So my questions are:

  1. Does a city have to post all of the above for Asset Disclosure to be valid?
  2. Isn’t disclosing all of that for non-elected city employees a bit of a privacy issue? I don’t think any city will ever do this.
  3. What is the definition of ‘top-level’?

Thanks for any input on this.

2

I see the same thing. Side question. How did you post a new topic? I’m unable to see where a new thread is allowed?

In our case some of the Asset information is pending and only in an offline format. I assume that is the same for the cities listed here. Some of their categorization should have been labeled as partial and not full. But it is hard to tell what is really wanted sometimes. Like for licensing, if it is a csv file posted online that I would assume the government license is ALWAYS public domain unless a state law says otherwise. I also see some of the posted datasets have become 404 errors. but are still ranked as 100 percent complete. And so far, my favorite cites have been Austin, Texas and Las Vegas, Nevada as far as making the data very readable and very usable. I am tending to think the effort here is very developer driven and automated and unlikely to have a human curator? Sort of an honor system?

3

@cosnate, it looks like you need to be up at the category level to add a topic. You don’t seem to see + New Topic when you’re reading a topic.

2440×736 189 KB

4

Right you are. thanks nate

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5

Hi @civicdata. Good point about the detail of the Asset Disclosure. I helped add SF’s and totally thought salaries was enough.

I believe we used to have a link to more detailed examples of what the Census was looking for. Sunlight Foundation had written these explainers for each dataset, something like these pages. I can’t find them anymore. I’ll work with them to see if we can get them back on the census.

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6

Thanks Andrew, nice to see you here.

Yes I did the same thing with Louisville. We have salaries posted, but not much of anything else listed. While I’d love see all of this data posted, I don’t think any city will ever meet that goal, and some seems to be a privacy invasion.

So should we revise all the existing cities that say they have this data open, and change it showing that it’s not open? If the definition is changed later then they could be added back if they meet the requirements.

Michael Schnuerle
Louisville Code for America Brigade