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Data.gov is part of the current administration's effort to show how they work and where your money goes. And they're asking us for help.
Craig Newmark
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Founder, craigslist + Craig Newmark Foundation

Founder, craigslist + Craig Newmark Foundation
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data.gov is part of the current Administration's effort to show how they work and where your money goes.

They're asking us for help; here's some of the results of the first part of that interaction, from Vivek Kundra, the country's CIO:

  • Set clear agency targets for bringing agency data online;
  • Maintain a transparency dashboard to show progress towards releasing data;
  • Find new, standardized ways to inventory and prioritize agency data for publication in open, downloadable formats;
  • Collaborate with the third parties to continually improve Data.gov;
  • Make Data.gov as comprehensive as possible for non-classified information; and
  • Adopt data dictionaries to ensure that terms have the same meaning across agencies.

Next? How you can help:

  • Our goal is to improve collection, storage, and dissemination of data
    government-wide. We'd appreciate your feedback on how to improve and
    grow Data.gov over time: How should we ask agencies to contribute data sets to Data.gov?
    Should we have them inventory and prioritize all their data? Or set a
    fixed number of data sets that must be published each year? Or set a
    voluntary target?

  • While our
    focus here is on developing government-wide policy for data
    transparency, we are also interested in hearing what new data you'd
    like to see on Data.gov and why. We'd also like to encourage you to make suggestions directly to Data.gov here.

  • Finally,tell us what types of applications you'd like to see built to leverageall this data. Share with us a little about why you think thoseapplications might be compelling. Better yet, if you are a softwaredeveloper, we encourage you to start using Data.gov to build applications useful to businesses, government, and the American people!
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