OSTP: Progress Toward Opening Government Data Resources

Posted by Nick Sinai and Dominic Sale on August 16, 2013 at 02:22 PM EDT

In May, the President signed an Executive Order to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs and others as fuel for innovation, economic growth, and government efficiency. Under the terms of the Executive Order and a new Open Data Policy all newly generated government data will be required to be made available in open, machine-readable formats, greatly enhancing their accessibility and usefulness, while ensuring privacy and security.

Today, we are building on this effort by releasing additional resources to help Federal agencies make data open and available in machine-readable form. Specifically, we are releasing additional guidance to agencies about how to inventory and publish their data assets, new FAQs about how open data requirements apply to Federal acquisition and grant-making processes, and a framework for creating measurable goals that agencies can use to track progress. All of this is openly available on the Project Open Data website, where additional case studies and free software tools for the agencies are also available.

Opening up a wide range of government data means more entrepreneurs and companies using those data to create tools that help Americans find the right health care provider, identify a college that provides good value, find a safe place to live, and much more. It also empowers decision makers within government, giving them access to more information to enable smarter, data-driven decisions.  Responsibly making government data open and widely reusable is good for the American people, and good for the American economy.

And to make it easier for the public and entrepreneurs to find, understand, and use open government data, we’re working to improve the central website about US government data – check out Next.Data.gov – a design prototype of the next generation of Data.gov. The team at Data.gov is shipping code every two weeks, and is eager to hear your thoughts about how to make it even better. You can provide feedback on Quora, Github, or Twitter.

Nick Sinai, U.S. Deputy CTO, Office of Science and Technology Policy
Dominic Sale, Supervisory Policy Analyst, Office of Management and Budget