By Teresa Carlson, Microsoft Vice President of U.S. Federal Government Sales
From http://www.futurefed.com
We know the President is taking the Open Government Initiative seriously. He is driving his team to find news ways to open the doors of government and let the people in.
The most recent example of dedication to an open government has been the launch of the new Data.Gov website. The stated goal of Data.gov is repository of downloadable Federal data. We’ve seen mixed press reviews on the launch, from Public CIO to ReadWriteWeb, but most opinion leaders agree and are hopeful that Data.Gov will lead to more interesting links to government data, which groups can use for a variety of purposes – analysis, creating new applications, etc.
Today, Data.gov serves as a place that federates data published and hosted by various government entities. We’re seeing that our own and other initiatives around Open government are great complements to Data.gov. For instance, Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) is a government data publishing solution to help make data readily and efficiently query-able and mash-able by people and software. It empowers Federal and State and Local Government customers to publish their data faster and cheaper.
Public participation and collaboration will play a key role in ensuring the success of Data.gov. This is a good step in the right direction for enabling transparency and openness. I believe this openness will promote greater efficiencies in the government and encourage innovation, which surmounts what we’ve seen before.
Nice editorial in the New York Times about Data.gov (May 25, 2009) that my friend Kevin Novak had posted on Twitter, #w3cegov, #w3c. I also retweeted to #slakm.
Wow – that’s an empressive website with big shoes to fill. As the article in Karen’s comment says, all federal agencies with data need to be there.