Data.Gov

Nancy Scola | March 5, 2009 - 2:47pm | 5 comments | Email This!

The New York Times' Brian Knowlton's got a good recap of a conference call with new U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, and Kundra lets it be know that he'll be establishing a Data.gov site "that will put vast amounts of government information into the public domain." (Me think Knowlton's using "public domain" in the colloquial and not legal sense.) With the proliferation of new administration stand-alone sites -- Recovery.gov, Financial Stability.gov, AStrongMiddleClass.gov -- we're going to need Domains.gov to keep them all straight.

[UPDATE] See? Every time you turn around, pop!, a new domain. This afternoon's: HealthReform.gov.

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Comments

Is Data The Answer?

by shimanepdf on March 6, 2009 - 2:34pm

Nancy,

I may be the heretic in the PDF / TechPresident crowd but I'm throwing this out there:

- So What? Is putting Data for the sake of Data "out there" for the citizens really useful? Is Data.Gov really the answer to our problems? What will our nation actually DO with this data?

When I was in the private sector (FedEx, Fannie Mae, webMethods, Motley Fool) we were overwhelmed with data, databases, customer relationship management systems, etc.....

The real value was in the analysis and insights provided by the data.

And the most important thing we looked at was this question:

- What positive action(s) can we take on this data to meet whatever goals we have as an organization? How is this data useful to us in order to make decisions.

Of course, opening up Govt data is a must have first step and one that needs to be done, obviously.

But, as you and Micah stated at RootsCampDC 08, our society, you and me, are overwhelmed with data and information.

Information is there.

It is what we, as a society, do with that information that really maters.

Best,

Shaun Dakin
CEO
StopPoliticalCalls.org
@EndTheRoboCalls
@IsCool

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Cheers,

Shaun Dakin – CEO & Founder
The National Political Do Not Contact Registry
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Not the answer, but a prereq

by Nancy Scola on March 6, 2009 - 4:05pm

Shaun -- It's a very good question, I think, and one whose time has come. I'll be even more of a heretic than you and argue that data won't amount to all that much without a funded corps of people with expertise in making sense of it. We used to call them journalists. But I'd also argue that this experiment we call the United States of America has gotten so complex, so intricate, and so networked that we can't afford not to have access to the nitty-gritty information driving it. I think it's fair to say that not knowing the ins-and-outs of, say, where billions of infrastructure dollars get spent widens the power gap between the government and we the governed. Now, will we know what to do with all this information? I honestly don't know. But we won't know unless we can have at it.

The difference between being swamped by databases and metrics and yadda yadda at FedEx or Fannie Mae and what we're talking about here is, I think, about audience. There are potentially millions of people ready to make sense of it all, and not just a few hundred or thousand employees.

Action.gov? Insight.gov?

by shimanepdf on March 6, 2009 - 4:29pm

Good points. Unfortunately, the journalists, even if they were still here, are not trained to understand how to manipulate and understand mountains of information. Most journalists I know (think Columbia, Northwestern J Schools) are amazing people who are generalists; people with liberal arts degrees.

50 years ago generalists could make sense of technology and science.

Today, that is very difficult to do.

You are right, there are millions of people vs. 100's at private companies.

Unfortunately, there are 1000's more every day that find themselves without a job at a private sector org and therefore may have the time to sort through this data and figure out:

So What?

Regards,

Shaun

—

--
Cheers,

Shaun Dakin – CEO & Founder
The National Political Do Not Contact Registry
-- A non-partisan, non-profit program by Citizens for Civil Discourse
Register Your Phone Number Now for Free: http://www.StopPoliticalCalls.org/

You're exactly right.

by tiredtonto on May 4, 2009 - 4:17pm

You're exactly right. Technology has become a difficult animal to keep up with, much less tame. Times are changing rapidly and we must look to change the way we see things. If not, things will continue to become even more difficult to gauge.

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Thx for sharing with

by cyberalone on May 10, 2009 - 1:32pm

Thx for sharing with us.
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