From pipe to platform: The US CIO on the future of open data

“Steven VanRoekel is the government’s top IT guy, but in a way he’s also its chief content officer. VanRoekel was named chief information officer for the U.S. last fall, a job that oversees the everyday tech needs in federal offices while also looking at big picture issues, like increasing the government’s computing efficiency and web policy. It also involves managing, at least on a grand scale, the government’s push to releasing vast amounts of data on the web. Journalists swoon at the thought of mountains of data to pore over, information rich with story possibilities. And yet in releasing raw data or structured APIs to the public, the government has shifted farther in the direction of publisher, a role journalists often like to keep to themselves... The centerpiece of the government’s tech transparency push has been Data.gov, the growing repository of federal datasets from departments within the executive branch. While VanRoekel is proud of the site, he said it needs to transform into a true open data platform, not just a spout people use to access government information. ‘We have to get out of the data business and into the platform business,’ he said. What VanRoekel wants is for the government to be more than just a dumb pipe. Instead he envisions a system where the government provides a service for citizens and developers to experience data, either through widgets and apps, or through what they create on their own. The government would be the jumping-off point. VanRoekel sees it as moving away from a kind of distributed presentation of data to a more centralized distribution. That distinction is important, he said, because the sheer volume of datasets across various agencies can be daunting... Another component would be the ability to track the usage and impact of the data, even using normal web analytics. That’s important, VanRoekel said, because effectiveness is just as important as openness. VanRoekel is vocal in his support of open data and the use of APIs... One result of the the new open initiatives on the federal level is that news outlets as well as independent developers have been taking advantage of that data either in reporting or consumer facing apps... Journalism, at least in this scenario, is as much about deciphering the unknown as it is about assembling a narrative from strings of bits and bytes. How does this dynamic change when the government wants to become a content platform? Governments and individual politicians have a long history of taking their message directly to the public... VanRokel’s goal is an optimistic one that shares commonalities with journalism: The desire to use information to help people make sense of things. As bullish as he is on making Data.gov a true platform, the country’s CIO doesn’t think it will supplant or replace the builders who are providing content based on federal data. The things journalists and coders provide is a way of finding relationships in data that make it more applicable to the average person. That’s something the government isn’t good at yet, VanRoekel said...”