The Obama Administration’s transparency and open government initiative has stirred much interest from both supporters and critics. Following Government 2.0 aspirations, a major mechanism to deliver this new transparency is through upgraded websites with greater focus on usability, improved access to various stores of information, and newer data visualization capabilities to aid understanding of the information itself. Seconding the need and support for this type of public initiative, the UK recently announced its own open data agenda.
According to the mission set forth in President Obama’s memo , three core values underlie the Open Government agenda: transparency, participation, and collaboration. The information to be shared is in part aimed at providing deeper transparency and insights into government activities themselves. Add to that the inherent value of exposing significant volumes of historic and more current event-based information. This information can serve various purposes, helping individuals more effectively engage with government parties, aiding in decision making, supporting innovation, and hopefully influencing more positive behaviors, actions, and outcomes. The ability to readily find and correctly understand available information is crucial to achieving these objectives. Data visualization is one technique being employed to help consumers quickly decipher and make use of this information, saving significant time and reprocessing efforts as well as providing inspiration for further analyses.
The Administration has sent out an appeal to federal and state agencies to get on the bandwagon, creating a few of its own sites to get the ball rolling. During 2009, portals such as Data.gov and USASpending.gov were unveiled, providing some dynamic interfaces and interesting data visualizations. The new IT Dashboard has a few nice interactive displays to help individuals explore and rapidly digest the information it is exposing. The site also lists planned features including new filtering and aggregation capabilities, chart customizations, and more, adding in yet another layer of transparency. These efforts should ,however, still be considered just a beginning.
Per the recent Fiscal Year 2011 Budget statement, the sites mentioned above were highlighted as some early successes but also used as examples to stress that more investment is necessary to accomplish targeted goals including reporting requirements set forth in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The government is anxious to get feedback on what types of information and views would be most valuable. Thus critics that are assessing outcomes based on what is visible today should speak out. In the meantime many agencies are flooding their sites with downloadable versions of information at what would be considered a breakneck pace given past performance. Sunlight Labs recently estimated the government’s dataset release volume over the last year to have superceded that from 1908 to 2008 combined. Most of these datasets are still only available in traditional file-based forms however future emphasis will be on generating Web services to enable more timely and integrated use-cases.
When one canvases the many agency and state websites it becomes glaringly apparent that more standardization and inter-agency coordination is needed. While unleashing all this information is a key first step, locating and traversing such disparate forms of data remains a challenge. Current government priorities and resources factor heavily in the short-term as to how and where improvement will be realized. Creating a more holistic and standardized environment for agencies would certainly help generate significant value in the long run.
There are many tools that can help bring this information to life. While some basic visualization capabilities are beginning to appear on these government portals, a growing cadre of third-party sites are emerging that combine various views of information via mashups to provide added context and targeted analyses. This arena will surely see further activity as will the expanded use of this information in the private sector. Corporate America will certainly want to take advantage of these newly available data sources and leverage more sophisticated business intelligence and analysis designed for their specific needs.
Enterprises should take a page out of these government actions by unleashing their own under-utilized information assets in a similar fashion to their core constituents, including employees, partners, and customers. Providing open and appropriate access to key information combined with user-friendly analytical tools makes for smarter and significantly more effective and efficient participants. Enabling more active citizenship is now not just seen as a government phenomenon but is a key thread in the new collaborative and participative or “social” way of doing business.
