Gov 2 Summit – Ellen Miller and Vivek Kundra

Core elements of what transparency means
-Data is a platform that can be added upon. Data means online. Data needs to be online and in real-time.

What is government’s role? Wholesaler vs retailer
Government needs to democratize data in a machine-readable format. It also is good that it should be displayed for american public. The wholesaler piece is more important than retailer

What are your plans with usaspending.gov?
It is important to put data online real-time. But lot of agencies have aging systems and can’t handle the domain. Transformation going on in the back-end. When wanted to do IT dashboard, everyone wanted to clean up data first. But Vivek wanted to put it up first and then it stated to get better right away. Data quality requirements there for putting out data that can affect investments, stock markets, and more.

Data.gov…up to 100,000 data sets but most were already online. What are your plans to expand it?
Data.gov is a platform to put out information across the government. Need to shift from technology. And move debate to public policy. When buy a car or camera, lots of data out there and compare effectiveness. But with health care hard to do that now and with outcomes. Energy is same public policy issue. Fed gov’t doesn’t have monopoly on best ideas.

What’s happening with OpenID?
US continues to invest in platforms that maybe they shouldn’t be investing in. Each agency forces you to create a separate account which leads to duplicate costs/services/poor service. Why not leverage platforms for services that aren’t sensitive in nature. Been working with OpenID foundation to set up a trust framework for the federal govt. Move from website brochure-ware to interactive

Why did recovery.gov redesign cost $8 million this year and $14 million next year?
Recovery board is leading the effort. This has never been done at this scale and tracked at all levels. Building that infrastructure and how that is calculated. Scale is enormous and has never been done historically.

Blog that was going to be launched at TSA and were talking about FISMA, data centers, etc and bill came to $600k. But smarter heads prevailed and realized could do free online