Joshua Gee is a public relations professional, political technologist, social media nerd, amateur public policy wonk, Eagle Scout, bleeding heart liberal and a son of the American Revolution.
Haven’t been blogging, busy at work, blah blah blah. Check out my other blog 2.0somethings.com, which was recently rebooted. I write there sometimes. I will try to be more faithful to the blog that actually has my name on it, beginning with this great interview from Steve Rubel’s lifestream.
Yesterday, the Obama administration took a big step forward on transparency by launching Data.gov. This has been something the Obama administration has been talking about for a while and it is nice to see that they could bring it to fruition so quickly. Obama’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra outlines his hopes for Data.gov in a short video posted to the Open Government Initiative’s Youtube Channel:
Overall, I think the site is a solid start but could use some improvements. I don’t really know enough about programming to know whether or not the data is in enough modern developer-friendly formats, but since I haven’t heard much outcry I am going to assume it is. One criticism I had was that after a good 20 minutes of searching, I didn’t find many useful data sets. That isn’t entirely true, I found some staggeringly useful data from the Department of Transportation on Airline On-Time Performance and Causes of Flight Delays. However, a lot of the sets I found didn’t strike me as particularly illuminating of the American experience. This could mean I am too slow to use the site correctly (a distinct possibility) but I think it just means that they have some work to do populating the site. However, people who know more about policy and data management can probably do amazing things with the lists that I shrugged off as unhelpful – the exact reason a site like this is so important.
The site has a small number of social features (you can comment on the data and suggest new data sets) but I think this Data.gov could really benefit from an attached blog. It would help make the data feel less impersonal and could serve to explain some of the more complex aspects of the site (like all of it) in layman’s terms. Additionally, a blog would be a way to highlight cool apps as they are developed, highlight new data sets as they are added and be a place where the White House could engage directly with the developer community. They might try to run some of that functionality through the Open Government Blog, but it doesn’t seem like they are or that it would be a good fit.
What makes me really excited is that the site has already spawned initiatives like this. The Sunlight Foundation is launching Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge, a $10,000 contest to design “compelling applications that provide easy access and understanding for the public, while also showing how open data can save the government tens of millions of dollars by engaging the development community in application development at far cheaper rates than traditional government contractors.” Ever since reading Wikinomics, I have been dreaming of the government creating projects like this. Even cooler would be if the administration began offering contracts for data analysis in more of a contest format – thought that is probably illegal or something. Whatever, big companies get paid a lot for government data analysis and don’t always do a good job. Beyond just offering the data, this could introduce some open competition into that arena.
Even though Data.gov could use a little more time to develop, it is a huge step forward and my favorite kind of initiative: the kind that combines good policy with good PR.