Are you a worker in the federal government? Then Federal CIO Vivek Kundra needs your help.Kundra took to his blog to underscore the importance of making federal data open to the public, a major piece of the Open Government initiative. As part of his message, he pointed out several ways that federal government employees can bolster the initiative:
“1. Our goal is to improve collection, storage, and dissemination of data government-wide. We’d appreciate your feedback on how to improve and grow Data.gov over time: How should we ask agencies to contribute data sets to Data.gov? Should we have them inventory and prioritize all their data? Or set a fixed number of data sets that must be published each year? Or set a voluntary target?
2. While our focus here is on developing government-wide policy for data transparency, we are also interested in hearing what new data you’d like to see on Data.gov and why. We’d also like to encourage you to make suggestions directly to Data.gov here.
3. Finally, tell us what types of applications you’d like to see built to leverage all this data. Share with us a little about why you think those applications might be compelling. Better yet, if you are a software developer, we encourage you to start using Data.gov to build applications useful to businesses, government, and the American people!â€
Feedback is going to be a crucial point for Kundra’s site moving forward, as the CIO and his team decide which direction to take the resource next.