Data.gov Heads For Overhaul

In documents circulating among federal agencies and released to the public on Tuesday, the Office of Management and Budget has laid out plans to move Data.gov out of "beta" phase and into "government-wide execution," as federal CIO Vivek Kundra put it in an interview last week. Released at the same time as the Obama administration's wider Open Government Directive, a memo and draft concept-of-operations document encourage agencies to post more data on Data.gov, with an eye toward ensuring data is machine-readable, high-quality, and useful while also protecting privacy and security interests. "Our key principles focus on making sure that we democratize as much data as possible and that that data is targeted towards high-value datasets," Kundra said. The White House has repeatedly held out the government data portal as a hallmark of its open government strategy. Until now, though, while broadly written policy missives from President Obama and the Office of Management and Budget have encouraged federal agencies to be more open, there's been little formal guidance on exactly how federal agencies should use Data DOT gov as a forum for their transparency. In many ways, it shows.