Building Inside-Outside Community Around Data.gov
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, December 8 2010
There's a newsy bit or two on the evolution Data.gov buried in this longer piece from earlier today on a recent food hackathon; according to Jeanne Holm, who serves as the Obama administration's evangelist for Data.gov, the federal government data hub will very shortly be getting a mechanism for collecting feedback around each data set on the site, in the form of thousands of document-specific discussion forums:
"We'd been kicking around the idea of creating discussion forum capabilities for each data set," [Holm] says on a call. "It might be overkill. They might go unused. But there should be a place to say, 'hey, there's an error in this table that I've corrected.' Or, 'hey, I've created this great app.'" And this weekend's hackathons, says Holm, provided added inspiration; the data-set specific forums are now slated to roll out on Data.gov next month. Each data set has, by design, 'a data steward' located within each agency whose responsible for that specific chunk of information.
"There's a belly button associated with each data set," says Holm, and the owner of that belly button will be called on by the federal government to track the feedback that users have about their data set.
Holm also said that the Data.gov team is exploring how they might go about collecting feedback about the data floating around on places like Twitter and Facebook. More broadly, Data.gov will take up in the new year the building of "communities of practice" on the site around different themes of data, in addition to the ones they're hosting now on the meta topics like the semantic web:
Law and health will roll out in the next few months, followed by ones on climate and education. Energy is on the docket, and others will follow shortly.
One criticism you hear about Data.gov is that it's too broadcast, not enough conversation. Holm didn't shy awy from the critique. "We need to listen," she said. "It's about making the connection between [for example] Dominic out the in public and Bill embedded deep inside the bowels of EPA. I'm not saying that we can do everything the public wants, but we can make every effort to hear what it is that they want."