I am a big fan of the mundane aspects of API operations. I love the day to day things it takes to make APIs work over the hype, big announcements, and over promising that tends to come with venture backed API discussions. To highlight what I am talking about and what I want to celebrate more, I wanted to showcase the recent API deprecation announcement in my inbox from the United States Department of Labor (DOL).
Good afternoon, this email is to notify you that DOL is modernizing its open data services. Our announcement at https://developer.dol.gov indicates that data access through older APIs (V1 and V2) will be shutting down, and going forward, we will be providing all programmatic data access and data-as-a-service through API V4.
We are offering public orientations to the new service, with upcoming sessions listed below. We encourage you to connect with us on the new platform, discover the new datasets we have provided access to, and attend our orientations.
Connect directly to the new service at https://dataportal.dol.gov
Register for a key on the new service at https://dataportal.dol.gov/registration
Contact us, get assistance, and provide feedback: https://dataportal.dol.gov/contact-us
Join us for an orientation session to the Department of Labor’s new Open Data Portal and modernized API data service. Session I will be held on Wednesday, October 16th @ 12:00 pm EST. And Session II on Thursday, October 17th @ 2:30pm EST.
We have made our data easier to find, access, understand, and use for DOL and its stakeholders.
Click here to register:
- Session I, Wednesday, October 16th @ 12pm – 1pm EST - https://usdol.webex.com/weblink/register/r2c67a3ea325721254d20802b7ab615a4
- Session II, Thursday, October 17th @ 2:30pm – 3:30pm EST - https://usdol.webex.com/weblink/register/r10f067245fe52e48bcc82e752f31af83
During these sessions, we will cover how to:
- Register for our API service.
- Discover new data sets.
- Check data suitability using comprehensive metadata.
- Request data with the API query builder.
- Find resources like instructional videos, customizable code examples, and an Excel Toolkit to help you access data using your preferred method.
Please circulate this invitation within your organization.
We look forward to seeing you there,
Office of Data Governance
U.S. Department of Labor
[email protected]
I love any communication around API change, especially taking the opportunity to onboard your consumers with the latest. The DOL is sensibly moving forward with the deprecation of their two oldest major versions, shuttering V1 and V2, keeping V3, but focusing all the attention on V4. They reiterate what it takes to onboard with their API and get support and provide feedback, but they also provide two days of an API orientation session tomorrow and Thursday. Providing everything you are going to need to onboard fresh as well as make the migration to V4 of the Department of Labor API.
While mundane and not something the API sector often showcases, I would hold this email up as a fine example of how to communicate around change management. Us technologists love to talk about API versioning until the cows come home, but it is low-tech emails and orientation sessions like this that help move the API conversation forward in meaningful ways. This is the API economy I can get behind because of how the DOL manages communication around API deprecation, but also it is an API that has such a large real-world impact. It is API work like this I will continue to profile and showcase here on the blog and help put more tools in your API toolbox when it comes to things you can do to reduce complexity and friction across your API operations and keep things moving forward.
