White House to Open Source Your Business Model

December 5, 2011 8 Comments

This is the inevitable conclusion of Government Data Portals.

As part of a joint effort by the United States and India to build an open government platform, the U.S. team has deposited open source code — an important benchmark in developing the Open Government Platform that will enable governments around the world to stand up their own open government data sites.

Government is trending to be open, open sourced and thus transparent.  Clearly selling against such a tidal wave is going to be very difficult.

You hear that? That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound... of your death.

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Data.gov Could be “Tabled”

March 31, 2011 1 Comment

RRW is reporting that sources say Data.gov and other open gov sites could be turned off.

Today the Sunlight Foundation and Federal News Radio reported that the public projects Data.gov, USASpending.gov, Apps.gov/now, IT Dashboard and paymentaccuracy.gov as well as a number of internal government sites including Performance.gov, FedSpace and many of the efforts related the FEDRamp cloud computing cybersecurity effort would be taken offline in coming weeks due to budget cuts by Congress.

So the spring of open data websites has hit the autumn of budget cuts.  Don’t worry about bigger budget issues as our government is totally on top of things.  Remain calm, all is well…

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Data.gov Geo Viewer: Lipstick on a pig?

July 27, 2010 17 Comments

So with great interest I read Marten’s blog post on the new Data.gov “Geo Viewer”.  Marten’s got a ton of reasons why its great and why it fails, but for me it didn’t work at all.  I just get this FAIL message below:

I mean maybe I could figure out what went wrong, but since Data.gov gives me no details about datasets I just move on.

Of course it could be one of the many problems Marten showcases, but I will say the “share this” works great.  In all seriousness putting a “preview” map on Data.gov isn’t going to change a thing about how worthless Data.gov is for actually finding data.  You can of course put your comment in the little box at Data.gov and I’m sure they’ll forward it on to “top men”.

Of course this brings up a huge point with how big a failure Data.gov has been.  Just going to the “Ideas” page for Data.gov, you are presented with a big middle finger.

What would I like Data.gov to look like in July 2010?  No really, I totally trust the government to do right by data.  Nothing says that nobody from the Data.gov crew looks at that Ideas page more than that simple statement.  Rather, it is more of an exercise to make citizens feel part of the process, distracting them from actually doing something about it.  Maybe it would be better to just go through ESRI to get things fixed.

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ESRI Clarifies Data.gov/ArcGIS.gov/GeoData.gov Relationships

June 8, 2010 1 Comment

Thanks to Adena, we’ve got some more details on ESRI’s work with Data.gov and ArcGIS.com:

An article entitled “White House to tie together mapping and data sites” recently appeared in NextGov magazine. Some of the information included in the article was either incorrect or not entirely clear. The information below is intended to help clarify some of the information that appeared in the article.

Read the whole statement over at All Points Blog.  My two cents is that this is still a smart play by ESRI.  ArcGIS.com is about “apps” and if you can develop apps on government data easily, it should be successful.  Closed or not, ESRI is center stage on creating apps with federal data.

As far as the sole-sourced contract and those details, I’m not sure if anything has been addressed on that.  This clarification almost causes more questions to be asked than answered.

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