IT Driven Government Transparency

The U.S. Government today just took another huge leap into the 21st century by launching a new website, data.gov. Their new site will make raw data available from several U.S. Federal Branch datasets that includes metadata, data in XML, Text/CSV, KML/KMZ, XLS, or ESRI. They give the public readily available tools that allow the people to data mine and extract information out of the available federal databases. Its refreshing to see our government taking steps to embrace information technology, this project was spearheaded by the Federal CIO Council who’s mission is act in a transformation way on how federal entities share information and collaborate.

More and more, we are seeing the U.S. government act in more transparent ways so that citizens who are interested in what their government is doing has the ability to search and sort into these massive data sources. This is yet another example of how the modern age is changing the way we view and interact with the world around us.

I am very interested in watching the progression of this site, as the degree of the accuracy and completeness of the information will ultimately decide how powerful it will be. The promise of this tool is if the dataset is large enough the general creativity of individuals and companies out there will be able to do things with the information beyond it’s intended scope.

Eventually I can envision a powerful search engine hooked into these datasets so I can search for things like, “Total spent on military contractors” or “Federal spending in Colorado” or “Official federal election results in Los Angeles County”.

This will also help the citizens keep our government honest, if they post information it is likely to be immediately copied and stored somewhere else. This way, should information be redacted at a later date, a record of it may still exist in another location. An example of this would be how Google stores cached web pages in their own databases when they crawl them. If the site is down or you just want to see what the webpage contained at the time a snapshot was taken you can compare the live site to the cached version.

I applaud our government for moving in the right direction and giving us more tools to get involved. A democracy requires the participation of its citizens and as long as we keep moving in this direction, we will be further empowered reach a more perfect union and a government thats accountable and works for all of us.








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