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Open Data: US Government Reports Progress, but Much More is Needed
McKinsey and Company estimates that the value of Open Data when considered globally could top $3 trillion.
In order to check the progress of Open Data within the US, the US Federal Government created an Open Government Dashboard. This was done following the issue of the Open Government Directive in late 2009. This dashboard is essentially a scorecard that shows primarily green indicators, which should imply that nearly all federal government agencies have made great progress in making the data collected from under their authority as open and available.
Yet a report from the Government Business Council (GBC) finds that only 25 percent of agencies say that their agencies are specifically targeting their open data strategies to meet the goals of the Open Government Directive. And only 20 percent of agencies say that they offer an API for developers to use to interact with the data that they’ve released.
Kin Lane, ‘API evangelist’, wrote critically about the availability of federal government data sets, saying that “there are thousands of data sets available via Data.gov, across 176 agencies and numerous categories. But we need more. When any content or data is published via a government website, that data needs to also made available via agencies data repositories and Data.gov. Agencies need to understand that releasing open data sets it not something you do every once in a while to meet a mandate or deadline–it is something you do always, forever.”
From the government perspective, IT executives have identified the following areas as top challenges they need to overcome when creating effective Open Data projects for their agencies:
- Data sensitivity (68 percent)
- Lack of funding (62.5 percent)
- Privacy (61.1 percent)
- Unstructured data (59.7 percent)
