Executive Order for Open and Machine Readable Data

By George Ford, Product Manager, Online Subscription Services, FC. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation Center.

Back in May, the White House issued an executive order and accompanying memorandum which stated that “the default state of new and modernized government information resources shall be open and machine readable.” For the nonprofit community, the announcement was intriguing. What would it mean if all that data on foundations and their grants were liberated from hundreds of thousands of IRS Form 990s and, for the first time, made truly open, searchable, and readable by machines?

While it looks like we’ll have to wait to find out, here at the Foundation Center we’ve decided to take a step toward that goal with the release of Foundation Directory Online (FDO) Free.