Commerce Department: Tell Us What You Want From Our Data

The Commerce Department is the largest producer of open data in the federal government. Your weather forecasts are brought you to by the good folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Census Bureau’s data can paint an almost block-by-block picture of the American populace. But under the leadership of Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, the agency isn’t content with just dropping massive data sets into the abyss of the Internet. The agency, which is composed of 12 bureaus, is “embracing crowdsourcing” on a small scale to improve the quality of the data it releases to the public, said Steve Cooper, the agency’s chief information officer. Whether you call them customers or consumers, Commerce wants their input. Given the wide range of data Commerce and its bureaus collect -- census data, economic information, weather and technical data, among others -- it makes good sense to determine if data could potentially be commingled or delivered differently.