WH releases new transparency site

The White House announced today the launch of a new website designed to make data used by the federal government available to the public.

It tweeted:

On Tap: 2:00 President on innovation & nonprofits; 5:00 CIO Vivek Kundra live-stream chat on amazing new transparency project

The new project is entitled data.gov. The site says that its purpose its to “increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch.” The site provides “provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available,” but it promises to increase the amount of data available.

The Obama administration has faced criticism recently that they have not improved transparency since the Bush administration left the White House. Specifically, skeptics cite their refusal to make White House visitor records publicly available.