I think this is more about changing the mindset of the typical workers at the federal agencies (hundreds of thousands of whom are not doing IT related tasks as their primary function). Those of us who work for these agencies as programmers & IT people have a big job to do.
Only recently have the govies started thinking about how their data can be useful to the general public. In the past everything had been stovepiped and guarded with peoples' live(lihood)s. Hopefully this makes them think about data integrity throughout the life of that data.
Think about how data used to be provided to the public before. A bunch of government folks had to collect data and make sense of it themselves and put it together in a report destined for congress. It's waaaaay different to just provide that raw data to the public. Rather, I think what we'll see is more sanitized data sets, after they've been internally analyzed and vetted (probably multiple times). Not exactly transparent.
But I hope one day, after many iterations of API building, we'll get to a point where the data truly is transparent.
> Only recently have the govies started thinking about how their data can be useful to the general public
The problem is that they can't anticipate how their data is most useful. Release and let the users decide.
> But I hope one day, after many iterations of API building, we'll get to a point where the data truly is transparent.
So, we should wait many years while, predictably, large budgets are blown on faltering "government innovation" projects, when we could just have the data and use it today?
LOL I think we both want the same thing. I'm just being realistic. I highly doubt you'll get all the data you really want, this year or next. Federal agencies have a hard time releasing data quickly. Too many checks and balances, too many people blocking, too many lawyers and unions, too many politicians.
Only recently have the govies started thinking about how their data can be useful to the general public. In the past everything had been stovepiped and guarded with peoples' live(lihood)s. Hopefully this makes them think about data integrity throughout the life of that data.
Think about how data used to be provided to the public before. A bunch of government folks had to collect data and make sense of it themselves and put it together in a report destined for congress. It's waaaaay different to just provide that raw data to the public. Rather, I think what we'll see is more sanitized data sets, after they've been internally analyzed and vetted (probably multiple times). Not exactly transparent.
But I hope one day, after many iterations of API building, we'll get to a point where the data truly is transparent.