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Democratizing Data

June 25, 2009

Wired magazine has a great interview this month with America’s first ever CIO, Vivek Kundra, who has been tasked with making the vast amounts of data collected by the Federal Government available for public use.  Kundra talks candidly about the need to open up this information to the people, and the power that can come from analyzing and understanding data. The project is now coming to life on the site data.gov.    Sources for data include the EPA, Library of Congress, FBI, National Science Foundation…. and on and on and on, with reports ranging from peanut recall data to most wanted lists to on time reports for airlines.

Here is an excerpt from the article explaining the goal of the site:

"The goal of Kundra’s new Web site, Data.gov, is create a place where all the information is easy to find, sort, download, and manipulate. He wants to put as much data out there as possible, then sit back and let the private sector come up with great ways to use it. He envisions a future in which well-designed spreadsheets, charts, and graphs are embedded in applications for phones, Facebook, and blogs."

This quote speaks to the power of data in our world.  Certainly our government has more of this raw material than anyone, and opening it up to be refined and tapped into by citizens and businesses will help to create new breakthroughs in our world.   Data gives us the ability to better understand our world.  Of course it often must be refined, shaped, and combined with other pieces of data to become useful information.  Once information is created, we have the opportunity to see our world in new and exciting ways.  it becomes the basis for informed debate, enlightened creativity, and compelling innovation.

By opening this data up to the public, the collective wisdom of the nation and even the world is being enhanced.  People everywhere will have greater insight, deeper understanding, and ultimately a better definition of the truth.  What to do then is a whole different debate, yet one that can also be guided by data.

The data.gov site is by no means perfect. It is definitely still a work in progress.  There are broken links, some reports and files have limited formats, it is clunky and cumbersome, there are limited feeds, and there is not yet much data from individual states.  Still, it appears that the site will continue to add enhancements, data sources, and useful functionality to address these issues.  Even in its current imperfect state, data.gov has the potential to deliver great information.

Something else I learned from the article is that Kundra is embracing concepts like cloud computing, software as a service and open source development – placing the government further up the innovation curve than I would have guessed.  It is plesantly surprising to see such things. 

Mr. Kundra closes the article with a quote that I really like – "By democratizing data, the American people will be able to hold their government accountable, based on evidence rather than talk."  Politics has no shortage of talk on both sides of the aisle.  It is great to see that perhaps data will play a bigger role in governing our country, informing our citizens, and advancing our economy.  While I would never wish for data to replace talking, I am hopeful that it provide us with more intelligent things to say.

And Data for All: Why Obama’s Geeky New CIO Wants to Put All Gov’t Info Online

Written by davidebowman · Filed Under Business Intelligence 

Comments

One Response to “Democratizing Data”

  1. Nick Wright on June 25th, 2009 6:35 pm

    Nice post David. That’s exciting to hear how the Government is catching on.

    - Nick

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