It sounds like Vivek Kundra, the federal government’s first chief information officer gets the importance of releasing unadulterated data.

In an in-depth interview with Wired, Kundra says, “The core principles are using open standards, presenting raw data, and distributing it in as many formats as possible. Public policy decisions are made using the data anyway, but the raw data is important because if it is massaged too much, you can lose the big issues.”

Amen to that. Journalists doing CAR have long used raw data about bridge inspections, voter registration and campaign finance to help report stories.

Let’s hope that government employees who fill journalists’ FOIA requests for data get the message.

While you’re over at Wired, make sure you check out its How to Open Up Government Data wiki, an ambitious effort to bring together government data users.
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Making sense out of dense chunks of numbers and other information is one of the big challenges in CAR, whether you’re a reporter or an information graphics artist. Many journalists doing CAR have turned to information design guru Edward Tufte for inspiration and wisdom.

Tufte’s approach is to discard the distracting details, so you focus on the most important information. He rails against “chart junk,” or unnecessary adornments on information graphics.

This article from Business Week offers a look at Tufte's ideas and activities. It also provides some examples of Tufte's “spark lines,” word-size information graphics that are based on large datasets.

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Last, an update to our article about the uproar over the Commercial Appeal’s Web database of gun permit records, which are public in Tennessee.

Some state lawmakers pushed to seal the records after the Memphis newspaper put the database online. However, the bill failed to get the minimum number of votes needed for approval.

A close win this time for open-records advocates. However, we'll see more battles like this one as journalists post more public information on the Web.