I recently was involved in a discussion debating the successes of Open Government.

Some of the individuals in the discussion felt the success of the Open Government initiative was the creation of Data.gov, but I disagreed saying that it was only a data catalog and even the featured data sets are difficult to use and understand.

We really need data apps and data stories from those that the public and decision-makers could use to justify funding and claim success.

The 25 most popular apps at Data.gov were mostly XML feeds and only 5 were Excel that I could easily make into data apps. Keep reading →