On March 3, news organizations published scoops about how the federal government’s centralized weather forecasters could lose their office space because the administration was planning to cancel a lease.

Big Local News has been archiving that leasing data, including keeping versioned changes so reporters can see what in their community has changed, and when. The weekly data releases are among the nearly 100 public data sets available through the organization’s platform.
The data from the General Services Administration also includes federally owned properties that could be sold off.

Besides making the data available, Big Local News published the code to get the data. Anyone can use that code to get the lease data. Users can also tweak the code to get other, different datasets from the data.gov platform and make them shareable as a project on the Big Local News platform, either as a one-time download or with recurring updates. The code could also be adapted to send federal data to other collaborative efforts trying to preserve the data.

The efforts to archive data this information comes in response to federal administrators removing data.

A different data set which was posted on the General Services Administration website March 4 listed hundreds of properties to be considered for disposal, including the Robert F. Kennedy building that houses the U.S. Department of Justice. That list has since been removed, with a message that it will be updated soon. Big Local News is providing a snapshot of that data as well as code used in collecting it.

You can view properties considered for disposal in a map we created, and download the data from there.

property-map

An effort to archive federal contract cancellations

Working with other journalists, Big Local News has been tracking federal contract cancellations in a data set that’s updated daily with code released freely.

This data is somewhat difficult to work with, but detailed local information is available within it. Efforts to make the data more accessible are already underway.

How to use federal contract cancellations

Journalists can use the data to identify local businesses hit by the cuts and investigate what that means for their community.

The contracts can be unusual, or routine. For example, the data include a $37.86 cancellation of an order for a screwdriver set from a Boston company that’s been working with the federal government for 24 years. Another contract cancellation is for the U.S. Marine Corps helicopter unit that flies the president; that involved $22,000 for a shrink wrap machine.

The data offers a curious level of detail, showing a $104.40 cancellation of a contract to a business owned by a disabled veteran who sells American-made lab equipment and supplies from Indianapolis. Another contract shows a cut of $2,061,033.03 for tribal-owned Ojibe Hazardous Abatement for work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

How Big Local News is working to save data

The push to save data and make it more available have brought together multiple efforts and organizations. Journalists at Big Local News, MuckRock and other organizations have been working with archiving organizations including Wayback Machine parent Internet Archive and the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. Big Local News’ Sarah Cohen, a senior data data journalist, has helped identify data sets for priority handling.

In a webinar, those organizations and the newly formed Data Rescue Project shared some resources to find or help with at-risk data.

The key is then using that data to report on impacts from administration actions. For example, some of Big Local News’ data sets can be matched with other sources to present a clearer picture of what’s happening.

  • Big Local News maintains a suite of layoff scrapers that’s already picking up significant layoffs near the nation’s capitol and across the country. Notifications are sent several times daily to news organizations participating in Big Local News’ Data+ program. This data is also updated daily as an Open Project in the BLN platform. Reporters can build on that data by looking at other data sets, such as a national unemployment tracker that includes federal worker layoffs, in data organized by former journalist Jacob Harris, or state-, metro- and county-level unemployment figures released through the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  • Big Local News maintains an index for the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, which includes thousands of charities that have been receiving federal funding -- much of which has already been cut. The audit data includes ZIP codes and flags that suggest whether the organization is at risk of going out of business. Reporters can use this data to start looking at detailed finances for the charities, or to match them up with records like the IRS Form 990 nonprofit filings made searchable through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.
  • A snapshot of foreign aid data is among the nearly 100 open data projects hosted by Big Local News.

If you have a dataset you have archived, or if you have identified data you would like help archiving, please fill out this form and Big Local News will try to help!