Steve VanRoekel

The Obama Administration is formally launching the US Digital Service.

Mikey Dickerson, a top private-sector engineer who was part of the team that helped fix HealthCare.gov will serve as the new Administrator of the US Digital Service and Deputy Federal Chief Information Officer. The digital team has one core mission: to improve and simplify the digital experience that people and businesses have with their government by:

• Establishing standards to bring the government’s digital services in line with the best private sector services;
• Identifying common technology patterns that will help us scale services effectively;
• Collaborating with agencies to identify and address gaps in their capacity to design, develop, deploy and operate excellent citizen-facing services; and
• Providing accountability to ensure agencies see results.

With this announcement, the Administration is also releasing for public comment two crucial components in our growing IT toolkit that will help enable agencies to do their best work -- the Digital Services Playbook and the TechFAR Handbook.

One year ago, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. This historic step is helping to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs while appropriately safeguarding sensitive information and rigorously protecting privacy.

Building upon the Administration’s Open Data progress, and in fulfillment of the Open Data Charter, we are excited to release the US Open Data Action Plan. The plan includes a number of exciting enhancements and new data releases planned in 2014 and 2015, including:

• Small Business Data: The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) database of small business suppliers will be enhanced so that software developers can create tools to help manufacturers more easily find qualified US suppliers, ultimately reducing the transaction costs to source products and manufacture domestically.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection: The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s entire digitized collection will be opened to software developers to make educational apps and tools.
• FDA Adverse Drug Event Data: Each year, healthcare professionals and consumers submit millions of individual reports on drug safety to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Currently, this data is only available through limited quarterly reports. But the Administration will soon be making these reports available in their entirety so that software developers can build tools to help pull potentially dangerous drugs off shelves faster than ever before.