

First Look at Next.Data.gov - abritishguy
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/07/15/first-look-nextdatagov

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mjn
Looks pretty reasonable, although for me personally the real question will be
how good the data organization / searching / maintenance / provenance /
exporting are. There are a number of open-data portals with a nice front page
backed by a not-as-nice archive, and if you use it regularly that matters a
lot more than the first impressions of a nice web design.

For example, the French government's open-data portal [1] has a pleasant
interface and a nice search, but much of the data itself is miscellaneous
files they've received from different departments or cities, not normalized
into any kind of standard format. I can grudging overlook a lot of it being in
Excel rather than some more portable data format like CSV, but much of it is
even inside PDFs rather than available in a tabular format.

[1] [http://www.data.gouv.fr](http://www.data.gouv.fr)

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jasonshen
As a tech entrepreneur that got parachuted into the federal government a month
ago as a Presidential Innovation Fellow - I will say that the people working
on next.data.gov are really tech savvy and thinking hard about how to make
this site as usable and accessible as possible both for developers and the
general public.

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H3g3m0n
I really, really hate those 'tile' layouts. And I don't think they are
appropriate for this kind of site.

You are given absolutely no idea what order stuff is presented in. Even if
they are in some kind of order the 'double sized' ones will throw you off.
There's no way to browse or sort by things like date.

Tiles are okish for ethereal content (although personally I hate ethereal
content too), but something like a database of datasets should have more
structure to it. I'm not trying to 'discover' what data exists, I will likely
have something specific I wish to look up.

Cant they just stick to a standard list?

Or why not take a page from file managers and let you choose the layout.

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peterkelly
"Last week, President Obama talked about the importance of opening government
data to the American people"

Given they're already doing the inverse, I guess this is the next logical
step.

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brimpa
It looks like we accidentally hugged their site to death.

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davecaraway
Hey, I'm Dave, one of the developers on next.data.gov. We're totally stoked by
the great community response that we received for the launch of next.data.gov
(even if we did have to fire up a few more servers to handle the hug!). Thank
you for caring about the open data mission, for checking out our site, for
providing feedback and, I hope, for getting involved with this and other
government open-data initiatives.

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grotos
Will NSA also publish their data on this site?

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zrail
There's a blog post with screen shots on whitehouse.gov:
[http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/07/15/first-look-
nextdat...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/07/15/first-look-nextdatagov)

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skram
The technology stack sounds very similar to
[http://hub.healthdata.gov/](http://hub.healthdata.gov/) ... I wonder if the
two groups are talking to each other to share notes... (probably not)

~~~
davecaraway
The Data.gov team collaborates with many other agency open data initiatives,
including Healthdata.gov. Many data sets in next.data.gov are sourced from
Healthdata.gov via their data.json file. See
[http://hub.healthdata.gov/data.json](http://hub.healthdata.gov/data.json)

You will notice similarities in "technology stack[s]" for open data
initiatives. This is great, as it promotes code reuse. Further, we utilize
popular open source projects like CKAN and Wordpress so that fixes benefit a
much larger community and so that more developers are familiar with the
underlying technology, hopefully making it easier to contribute to open data
initiatives.

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zeckalpha
'Error establishing a database connection'

~~~
davecaraway
Hi, this is Dave from the next.data.gov team. We brought more servers online
to handle the traffic surge. Thank you.

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scholia
Quite like [http://sulia.com/](http://sulia.com/) but not as legible...

