The White House just released their Open Data Action Plan which is worth taking a look at if you have a few minutes. It’s the Government’s approach to treating data and information as a national asset which means opening up it’s data whenever possible. We have seen this in action with data.gov which allows visitors to explore data on everything from agriculture to weather.
Opening up data and information is being seen as a way to further help fuel innovation while tapping into the collective intelligence of citizens to be able to solve problems. Clearly the Government won’t be sharing all of their data but what they are sharing is rather extensive. The meat of the Open Data Action Plan are the four commitments that The White House has made.
Publish open data in a discoverable, machine-readable, usable way
Data.gov is an example of what this looks like. The goal is for The White House to not only provide the data but to make it easy for users to manipulate and extract insights from the data that it provides.
Work with the public and civil society organizations to prioritize open data sets for release
New data sets are going to be prioritized and shared based on public feedback. Think of it like a global voting system. Obviously the government has tons of data that it collects so this provides a method of sorting.
Support innovators and improve open data based on feedback
This will be done in several ways which include: in-person and online events such as idea jams, offering open source tools to help users share and improve open data, hosting feedback sessions, and launching incentives and challenges to use open data to solve problems and meet policy goals.
Continue to release and enhance high-priority data sets
The U.S. Government is going to rely on what it calls Presidential Innovation Fellows that will all work on various data innovation projects. These fellows will team up with various government agencies for 6-12 months. These agencies include NASA, The U.S. Department of Interior, The U.S. Department of Energy, The IRS, and many others. Each agency is faced with a particular set of challenges around opening up their data which is where the Innovation Fellows will help.
It’s a great and important sign to see the U.S. commit to open data. By giving more people access to data the amount of problems that can be solved and complexity of the problems that can be solved increased dramatically. It’s akin to managers tapping into the collective intelligence of their employees for decision making but taking that concept and applying it at a much broader scale.
My Linkedin article, “The Number One Thing That All Employees Should Be Doing At Work: Building Weak Ties” talks about that in more detail.
It will be very interesting to see where this leads in the next few years, not just in the United States, but around the world.
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