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alexvoda | 1 year ago

Trump did this last time too. Is there a difference in the level of preparedness in archiving data compared to last time? If so, in what way is it different? Is there institutional or independent preparedness?

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JackC|1 year ago

(Note my lab isn't partisan and this isn't a partisan effort; public data always needs saving. But there's definitely a reason people are paying attention right now.)

I think in some ways the community was less prepared this time, because there was a lot of investment in 2016-2017 and then many of the archives created at that point didn't end up being used; partly because the changes at the federal level turned out to be smaller and slower in 2017 than they're looking like this time. So some people didn't choose to invest that way this time around.

[Edit: this means I think it's really important that data archives are useful. Sorting through data and putting a good interface on it should help people out today as well as being good prep for the future.]

In other ways there's much more preparation; EOT Archive now has a regular practice of crawling .gov websites before and after each change of administration, which is a really great way of giving citizens a sense of how their government evolves. It will just tend to miss data that you can't click to in a generic crawl.