Jeanne Holm, Data.gov evangelist, invited the World Wide Web eGovernment Community to a conference call presentation and discussion this yesterday on Creative Commons licensing of open government data (OGD) and services.
Creative Commons licensing addresses issues surrounding credit to contributors, that there is no endorsement and no misrepresentation. It can get rather complicated to the non-lawyer. But this video clip helps put it into perspective. Keep reading →
Data.gov evangelist Jeanne Holm emailed and tweeted today: “I wanted you to be among the first to hear about an open source release for an Open Government Platform” that among things, shares Data.gov with India.
The action is part of the recently launched the U.S. National Action Plan on Open Government, announced by President Obama. It represents another step under the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue to produce “Data.gov-in-a-Box,” an open source version of the U.S.’s Data.gov data portal and India’s India.gov.in document portal. In fact, according to the Data.gov site, 28 countries have now adopted open data sites to share information.
The U.S. and India are working together to produce an open source version available for implementation by countries globally, encouraging governments around the world to stand up open data sites that promote transparency, improve citizen engagement, and engage application developers in continuously improving these efforts.
Technical teams from the governments of the U.S. and India have been working together since August of this year, with a planned launch of a complete open source product (which is now called the Open Government Platform (OGPL) to reflect its broad scope) in early 2012.
It’s less clear what is new here. You can find out more about the evolution of this project from the U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel and Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra in a joint announcement they made on a White House blog post today. And more about the Open Government Platform repository is on Github. You’ll find here a growing set of open source, open government platform code that allows any city, organization, or government to create an open data site.
In reviewing this site, I essentially found only: Create a new database in MySQL and Login using the default Drupal administration username and password. I also went to India.gov.in and found something that had been copyrighted in 2005. Is there something new I am missing here?
The announcement goes on to say: The first module released is the Data Management System, which provides the tools and capabilities for an automated process for publishing data in the Open Government Platform, an open source product designed to facilitate governments around the world to stand up their own open government data sites.
Our next planned release will be from India and related to the web site for the Open Government Platform. The U.S. and India will be providing additional modules in the future, and developers are encouraged to participate, provide feedback, and create new modules and capabilities! The teams working on this project are the National Informatics Centre in India and Data.gov in the U.S.
I asked Jeanne for an interview to get more details and she responded: “The best place to get an interview is through the White House Media Office. You are welcome to contact them directly at media@omb.eop.gov and they are ready to respond!” I did and heard back there were no officials to interview. When I asked where I could see what this would look like, she said: The code release is on GitHub, which is where we and others can provide additional modules as they come up. So I am wondering where is the platform and the real rationale for doing this?
I know that Data.gov has experimented with several platforms (as I have written previously) trying to evolve from catalog-to-repository-to-platform to actually find and access data and build apps, but the latest experiment with Socrata has been criticized as not being an open procurement and an open source platform. So maybe that is what this is all about – trying to straighten that out while looking like providing a service to the world.
I just wrote about how Data.gov.uk provides a real service to the UK and how data.gov would do well to emulate that as a concrete service to the US taxpayers that have been paying, expecting, and even demanding it for several years now.
It is hard not to think that when our leaders make mistakes (which we all do), they are prone to try things that are even bigger mistakes rather that admit them and ask for help, which in this case is right next door – the UK!
This week at the SemTech Biz DC Conference, Jim Hendler, advisor to Data.gov, explained the history of the “friendly competition” between the US data.gov and data.gov.uk and said that the latter had about 6000 data sets that were in better shape than the former. So I decided to take another look and was very impressed.
Hendler also said that the UK Government has designed and made great use of standard Web address practices in their linked data and moved even further ahead of the US in open data with creation of the Open Data Institute. Keep reading →
Recently, Shelley Metzenbaum, associate director of performance and personnel management at the Office of Management and Budget, blogged about Saving Taxpayer Dollars With Moneyball.
She said: “Using all the relevant data we can find to do more with less must be the rule, not an exception, in government.” Keep reading →
The purpose of the USDebtClock.org is to inform the public of the dire financial condition of the United States of America–and it does it a pretty good job. The origin and history of the National Debt Clock from physical billboard to online is told in Wikipedia.
The US Government has recently featured several spending dashboards (Recovery.gov, IT Spending.gov, etc.) and most recently the Federal Procurement Data System – Next Generation. Keep reading →
Having recently completed a three month assignment at Binary Group to help bring semantic web standards and semantic technologies to various parts of the Department of Defense (DoD), I gained an increased appreciation and respect for the work of DoD and our service people. I learned more about their specific content and IT requirements and wanted to share some of my lessons learned with our readers.
Keep reading →
When Data.gov first launched, I thought it just was for tabular data sets. Then it expanded to include thousands of geospatial data sets. At the time, I thought it needed a geospatial data viewer so I created one that worked with both the tabular and geospatial data sets. Keep reading →
The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrations that began Sept. 17, 2011, in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street financial district, launched by the Canadian activist group Adbusters have become a worldwide movement. The protests have focused on social and economic inequality, high unemployment, greed, as well as corruption, and the undue influence of corporations-particularly that of the financial services sector-on government. The message is perhaps best summed up with the protesters’ slogan, “We are the 99%,” referring to the growing difference in wealth in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population.
The Gini coefficient is a measure of the inequality of a distribution, where a value of 0 expresses total equality and a value of 1 maximal inequality. It has found application in the study of inequalities in disciplines as diverse as sociology, economics, health science, ecology, chemistry, engineering and agriculture.
While developed European nations and Canada tend to have Gini indices between 0.24 and 0.36, the United States’ and Mexico’s Gini indices are both above 0.40, indicating that the United States (according to the US Census Bureau) and Mexico have greater inequality.
Using the Gini coefficent can help quantify differences in welfare and compensation policies and philosophies. However it should be borne in mind that the Gini coefficient can be misleading when used to make political comparisons between large and small countries. The Gini index for the entire world has been estimated by various parties to be between 0.56 and 0.66.
The data set and related information are available on my social knowledgebase.
So while the United States has greater inequality (40.8) according to the U.S. Census Bureau than countries such as Canada, France, Spain, and Australia (see map above), it is lower than the world average index (0.60 ) and is not among the top ten countries (62.9-56.3).
The Department of Defense’s deputy chief management office (DCMO) has just released a Request for Information (RFI) that reminded me of an Breaking Gov story I did about 4 months ago, in which now-retired Gen. James Cartwright and Deputy Chief Management Officer Beth McGrath said semantic interoperability will drive DoD’s information environment.
I was asked how this RFI, which deals with the semantic web, can help DOD in particular and perhaps the federal government on a broader scale because I have worked on semantic interoperability for the government for the past 10 years and on a DOD Enterprise Information Web the past 6 months. Keep reading →
It is clear to me that the CIA needs big data, like Zettabytes (10 to the 
21st power bytes), and the ability to find and connect the “terrorist dots” in it. As of 2009, the entire Internet was estimated to contain close to 500 exabytes which is a half zettabyte.
Recently I have listened to three senior CIA officials — two former and one current — talk about this and the need for data science and data scientists to make sense of it.
Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and National Security Agency, and Principle Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Bob Flores, former chief technology officer at the CIA, spoke about this at the MarkLogic Government Summit; and Gus Hunt, current CTO at CIA, spoke about this at the Amazon Web Services Summit that I wrote about recently.
General Hayden framed the problem as follows: Cold War Era — easy to find the enemy, but hard to stop them (e.g. Soviet tanks in Eastern Germany); versus the Global War on Terrorism — hard to find the terrorist, but easy to stop once their found (e.g. the underwear bomber on the airplane). He said we live in an era where it is not a failure to share data, but with processing the shear volume and variety of data with velocity that is the result of sharing.
He shared his experience meeting with former Egyptian President Mubarak before the recent Arab awakening due to social media that resulted in his overthrow and then meeting with the President of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, whom he asked: How does it feel to overthrow a government–something the CIA, when Hayden was director, was never able to do?
Hayden also said we need tools to predict the future from social media and data scientists to use them.
I told him about my work with Recorded Future that was also the subject of an Breaking Gov story.
Bob Flores, former CIA CTO, said that Recorded Future was a new, fantastic technology and that the old model of collect, winnow, and disseminate fails spectacularly in the big data world we live in now. He used the recent movie “Moneyball” as an example of how the new field of baseball analytics called Sabermetrics has shown there is no more rigorous test (of a business plan) than empirical evidence.
He said that in this time of budget cuts and downsizing the creme will rise to the top (those people and organizations can solve real problems with data) and survive. And Flores agrees with Gen. Hayden that while all budgets are on a downslope (including for defense, intelligence, and cyber), that cyber is on the least down slope of all the rest because it is realized that limiting the analysis of big data would be equivalent to disarmament in the Cold War era.