Next steps

The deadline for legislators submitting bill(s) for the 2025 legislative year is 22 Nov 2024.

…but this is a multi year project.

We need to focus on both the short and intermediate terms:

• what bill do we submit this year?
• what research do we do so that we can submit better bills in Nov 2025, for the 2026 year?

Tasks:

1. learning what data sources already exist inside New Hampshire government (I’m sure that there are thousands of reports already going to the feds, to insurance companies, etc). I know that police report to the FBI using some sort of common data reporting system, for example. How you can help: see the page NH data sources and perhaps edit it (instructions in that page).

2. thinking about the tension between (a) easy legislation to write that dumps tons of data, e.g. “post the TPS reports that you already send the FBI”, and (b) harder legislation that pulls out exactly the data fields we want and makes it very easy for casual users to start downloading stuff and doing things.

3. thinking about tools that we might write that could bridge the gap from more complete data sources to more comprehensible data for the masses. I’m torn on this - I don’t want the initiative to hang on tools that we as activists write … but I also don’t think that we can legislate civil servants into doing a good job. How you can help: see the page data tools and perhaps edit it (instructions in that page).

4. codifying all of this into legislation ASAP (the deadline for submitting bill ideas to OLS is 2024 Nov 22).

What data do we want to ask for first?

Crowsourced on Signal 2024 Nov 9:

• EZ pass road usage data. Each collection point by hour and day.
• 91-A requests - how many such requests, duration until response, how much do they cost, did the gov body extend the deadline, did they fight it?
• maybe a survey committee or bill, asking every gov department to report on what data sets it already has?

Criteria:

we want to avoid asking for datasets that

1. provides an excuse for gov spending (both bc we don’t want more gov spending, and bc we don’t want a price tag to kill the bill)
2. sounds like it might be privacy-infringing (even if it isn’t)
3. … ?

We want to prioritize asking for datasets that hit one or more of the following criteria:

1. are low hanging fruit with existing data (road usage data?)
2. have broad citizen interest (Tax/Spending related ?)
3. have narrow but passionate interest (DCYF ?)
4. provide some strategic advantage (91a ?)

Candidates:

1. better version of this? So the bill would be: Provide existing data in iplatform in a csv/xml/json file available as a link on the existing platform. Or something like that.