Title: Data.gov: Selling the Government and Democratization of Information
Author: Alix Vance
Source: Scholarly Kitchen
Publisher: Society for Scholarly Publishing
Date (published): 25/05/2010
Date (accessed): 02/06/2010
Type of information: blog post
Language: English
On-line access: yes (HTML)
Abstract:
Last Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative (OGI). The occasion was honored with a cupcake and candle on the landing page of the newly re-designed Data.gov site and a widely disseminated announcement from the White House... Data.gov includes more than 250,000 datasets, up from 47 made available at launch. The impact of the OGI is not confined to the United States. At present, six nations outside the U.S. are also developing open repositories of government data...
The message from the Obama Administration is that the OGI signals a sea change for government information that will:
- Spawn a global movement to democratize access
- Enable global linking of data
- Foster innovation and transparency via the creation of “community developed” applications
...
Professionals will find or create the means to build utilities from these emerging global repositories of government data that will:
- Enable comparisons of data that has historically been unavailable, siloed, and non-standardized
- Deliver tools that surface previously hidden relationships between data points and suggest relational meanings
- Aid users develop new hypotheses and research entry points
Whether this translates to empowerment of the general public — or strictly adds to the use of charts and graphs in presentations and articles by researchers and in the media, which pass by the general citizenry — is an open question.
...
Pending questions:

Will the technology community remain fiercely committed to using open data to serve the public good?
Will commercial interests predominate?
Will the level of commitment and interest in the objectives of a global data program continue without institutional incentives?
Does the Administration have its own plans for making this type of information digestible for the general public?