There’s a Commerce Department ‘SWAT team’ opening up government data

Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker said that one of the surprises of becoming secretary of commerce in 2013 was finding that the department didn't have all that much to show for the great heaps of data it had shoveled onto Data.gov.

The Data.gov team housed at the General Services Administration "called us up and said you haven't been contributing appropriately," Sec Pritzker said. "And so we dumped our 39,000 data sets on Data.gov" -- from lists of people banned from exporting products from the United States to statistics on shark death rates in the Florida commercial fishing industry. But that is not enough, she said. "The point is just dumping data sets out there is not useful," said Sec Pritzker. "What we need to do is to figure out a strategy." Sec Pritzker said the department is pulling together a "SWAT team" with help from US Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith to determine "the most exciting" things they can do with the data stored on the site during what remains of the Obama administration's tenure.