

Fate of Data.gov Revealed; US Gov Almost Completely Drops the Ball - helwr
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/fate_of_datagov_revealed_us_gov_almost_completely.php/

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cjoh
The dumb part here is really that cutting these problems INCREASES the cost of
government. By a lot. Taking public data offline, or making it less accessible
means it gets FOIAd instead. FOIA costs the government a half billion dollars
a year.

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oasisbob
Need an example of how the data.gov team did some great work?

Compare a search for "interchange fees" on the <http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr>
site, with federalregister.gov. Not only does it return the most relevant
result in the #1 spot, but it's also beautiful and usable:

[http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2010/12/28/2010-3206...](http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2010/12/28/2010-32061/debit-
card-interchange-fees-and-routing)

The Federal Register is a critical function of how our government functions.
My jaw dropped the first time I saw the new site, it's sad to compare with
what we were forced to put up with before.

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T_S_
"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask
what API you can do for your country."

\--JFK 2.0

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scottkduncan
This is very unfortunate and demonstrates how easy it is to kill a relatively
inexpensive program that has enormous potential upside when its constituency
is diffuse and dividends from it may only be realized in the future.

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kongqiu
So if I'm BigContractor X or Union Y, I have a few issues I really care about
and have the willingness to spend money to influence legislators. Open data
does not concern me.

But since the the beneficiaries of "open data" are widely dispersed, who
lobbies on behalf of greater transparency? Sounds like a startup opportunity!

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cjoh
The Sunlight Foundation, OMBWatch, POGO, and a variety of trade associations
for newspapers and investigative reporters lobby on behalf of transparency
issues.

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beefman
So after 2.5 years of doing jack shit, the forthcoming budget cut is the
problem? I see.

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beefman
Can any of the moderators who downvoted this tell us how much has been spent
on data.gov over the past two years and how useful they think it is presently?

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cjoh
I downvoted this comment. I work in the government transparency space, and I
can tell you I think these tools are incredibly useful. Overall, if you do
some deep diving into what data.gov actually costs the answer is -- as always
that it depends.

If you look at just the technology and infrastructure costs, Data.gov itself
costs about a half million dollars a year to run. Layer on staff time and
you're looking at roughly double that.

A week ago, I spoke with the Data.gov team, which now consists of 4 FTEs: an
evangelist, a person whose job it is to get agencies to put their data on
data.gov, a program manager (who basically manages the contractors, REISystems
and Socrata), and 1/5th of Sonny Bhagowalia's time. Based on the work of this
team, Data.gov has generated a significant ROI.

For example: when I was at the Sunlight Foundation, we held a contest called
Apps for America to promote Data.gov which offered 25,000 to the developer who
built the best app on top of data.gov data. One of the winners was an app
called GovPulse.us which took the Federal Register and built a website around
the data.

The Federal Register is the official journal of the united states. It's where
all the public notices and stuff go -- so making that data more accessible is
important, and making it so people can sort through it and link to it is also
important. But ideological issues around transparency aside -- a few weeks
after the contest concluded, the Government Printing Office issued an RFP
looking for someone to build a new website for the Federal Register.

With some work, the fellows that built GovPulse.us (which is open source) were
called in to help build FederalRegister.gov, at a fraction of the cost of what
the government intended. Based on what the federal government usually spends
on websites -- That single event of adopting open source software and
repurposing it -- probably saved the government upwards of ten million dollars
-- far more than what's spent on Data.gov.

Another company, BrightScope.com, is able to use data.gov data to build a
platform for pension analysis. While their tax revenues are probably not
paying for data.gov, they are a strong, growing business generating wealth for
its shareholders and employees. When government open data has the opportunity
to mature, it does this. Your weather reports, GPS data, and flight data
usually come from government data sources which are beginning to become
accessible via data.gov.

Startups ought to be outraged by this for this reason alone. The fact is,
there are THOUSANDS of opportunities to build businesses off of government
data. SEC Filings, TIGER maps, Census data, BLR Statistics -- there's a
tremendous opportunity here for a program that's operating inside the margins
of government expense and has likely paid for itself many times over already.

Cutting the program, or saying it doesn't work means you aren't paying
attention to either current performance, or future potential. Both of which
are just fine.

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cjoh
I should note though that none of that is why I downvoted you. I downvoted you
because I thought the comment was not substantive,was inflammatory, and didn't
bring any value to the conversation other than what came across as
confrontational name-calling.

To me, it seems like it was likely an ideological complaint about the
administration rather than demonstrative of the facts. Political ideology
doesn't belong on HN.

Happy to upvote a comment that challenges those assumptions.

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beefman
> Political ideology doesn't belong on HN.

If my comment contained political ideology, then so did the story itself.

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clistctrl
Why don't they publish the data in a quick and dirty no frills way, and let
hackers like myself pretty it up? Data.gov has a lot of value, and I'd love to
contribute some of my free time working with it.

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grantjgordon
Exactly. When data.gov first launched I was really excited because somehow my
mental image of what it should be was a raw dump of all the datasets they had
available. What a found was something that felt very sanitized and sparse
compared to what we all know the government actually has. Making all that data
available in any format would spur all kinds of new ideas and businesses.

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swaits
Government is so good at managing this sort of thing. We should really ask our
government to do more stuff because of its stellar track record! <sigh>

