Dave Maass – A team of over 40 transparency activists aimed their browsers at California this past weekend, collecting more than 400 database catalogs from local government agencies, as required under a new state law. Together, participants in the California Database Hunt shined light on thousands upon thousands of government record systems. California S.B. 272 requires every local government body, with the exception of educational agencies, to post inventories of their “enterprise systems,” essentially every database that holds records on members of the public or is used as a primary source of information. These database catalogs were required to be posted online (at least by agencies with websites) by July 1, 2016. EFF, the Data Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, and Level Zero, combined forces to host volunteers in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and remotely. More than 40 volunteers scoured as many local agency websites as we could in four hours—cities, counties, regional transportation agencies, water districts, etc. Here are the rough numbers:
680 – The number of unique agencies that supporters searched
970 – The number of searches conducted (Note: agencies found on the first pass not to have catalogs were searched a second time)
430 – Number of agencies with database catalogs online
250 – Number of agencies without database catalogs online, as verified by two people…”
Download a spreadsheet of local government database catalogs: Excel/TSV 
Download a spreadsheet of cities and counties where we did not find S.B. 272 catalogs: Excel/TSV