Thinking Governmental Data as Infrastructure

Vivek Kundra posted on the White House blog his idea about why we want to bring governmental data online in machine-readable format:

Government data permeates our lives.  The atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standardizes our time, dictating when we arrive at meetings and take our children to soccer practice.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides our doctors and media outlets with information about how to keep our families healthy when there is a new public health concern, such as the H1N1 (swine flu) virus.
Data is powerful.  It informs and it creates opportunities.  It promotes transparency and it helps to ensure accountability.  Yet, it is a challenge to collect, organize, and communicate the vast stores of data maintained across the government.
Here are the questions he wants you to think about. And while we are at it: is this an initiative that we should start in countries like Albania, Afghanistan, Austria, China, Colombia, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Russia, and Switzerland (this is where most of you are coming from)?
  1. Our goal is to improve collection, storage, and dissemination of data government-wide.  We’d appreciate your feedback on how to improve and grow Data.gov over time:  How should we ask agencies to contribute data sets to Data.gov? Should we have them inventory and prioritize all their data? Or set a fixed number of data sets that must be published each year? Or set a voluntary target?
  2. While our focus here is on developing government-wide policy for data transparency, we are also interested in hearing what new data you’d like to see on Data.gov and why.  We’d also like to encourage you to make suggestions directly to Data.gov here.
  3. Finally, tell us what types of applications you’d like to see built to leverage all this data.  Share with us a little about why you think those applications might be compelling.  Better yet, if you are a software developer, we encourage you to start using Data.gov to build applications useful to businesses, government, and the American people!
RT @tlangkabel // @whitehouse: Data Transparency via Data.gov: US CIO Vivek Kundra asks for your input on the future of Data.

About Philipp

Philipp Müller works in the IT industry and is academic dean of the SMBS. Author of "Machiavelli.net". Proud father of three amazing children. The views expressed in this blog are his own.

09. June 2009 by Philipp
Categories: Blog | 1 comment

One Comment

  1. None'
    Sebastian Haselbeck says July 12, 2009 at 11:03 am

    here's some technical stuff on machine-readability:
    http://apps.sfgov.org/opendata/index.php/Docume…