In case you hadn’t noticed back in January, on his first full day in office the President issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, in which Mr. Obama states that:
- Government should be transparent
- Government should be participatory
- Government should be collaborative
Out of this “Open Government Initiative”, came what may turn out to be Mr. Obama’s most exciting website to date, Data.gov. Though it does sport Obama-esque graphics, it promises more than a glimpse of our commander-in-cheif’s talking head. It’s goal “is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.” It would seem to deliver on the promise of transparent, participatory and collaborative government by allowing the masses to crunch and display any amount of this data that they care to. The only limit should be the designer’s imagination coupled with the developer’s skills.
One feature of the site that is intended to keep this collaborative and participatory is the rating of data sets. It’s great that the public can critique the output of an agency’s data, but the question that immediately comes to mind is how government agencies are encouraged and rewarded for outputting strict and usable data. Even if the public is savvy enough to navigate through bad descriptions and limited formats to identify a truly terrible and mangled up dataset, why should any one agency care if Joe Shmoe can’t make an earthquake dashboard wigdet?
It’s one thing to create a website and a promise, but incentives are necessary for Data.gov to be a truly powerful and collaborative tool to inform the American public. If anyone has information on how the Obama Administration intends to tackle this, or if they have already, please chime in. Once they’ve figured this out and there are more datasets available, then we should discuss ways to improve the site (which Data.gov seems to encourage).
image credit: blprnt_van
[...] a follow up to my previous post regarding the necessity of incentives to fuel high Data.gov standards across all agencies I did [...]