Open Data

Moving from Open Data to Open Knowledge: Announcing the Commerce Data Usability Project

Opening up government to better serve the American people has been a key priority of this Administration from day one. On his first full day in office, President Obama signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, ushering in a new era of open and accountable government. Since then, the Administration has continued to take

Jeffrey Chen

Tyrone Grandison

Kristen Honey, PhD

Jan 29, 2016

A 2016 Look Ahead: What’s on the Horizon for Digital Government?

With January, and the tearing off of the old calendar, comes the annual taking stock of where we’ve been in the last year and where we can go in the year ahead. So for this month’s editorial theme, we’re taking a closer look at what we think 2016 will bring for digital government—from mobile and

Andrea Sigritz

Jan 12, 2016

The Data Briefing: Using Federal Open Data to Understand How Government Performs

Some highlights from the recent fall conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management: Localities that receive disaster mitigation funds also have more disaster declarations. Longer, more detailed proposed regulations receive fewer challenges to implementing the regulation. Agencies that are better at quantifying their results are safer from budget cuts. The findings above

Bill Brantley

Jan 06, 2016

The Data Briefing: Design for Developer Experience (DX) and Data Prosumer Experience (DPX)

Recently, DigitalGov devoted an entire month to exploring how good user experience (UX) helps government design better digital products and services. UX is the art and science of understanding how people will use a website or mobile app to solve a problem or meet a need. UX is a combination of neuroscience, communication theory, information

Bill Brantley

Dec 30, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Providing Anytime, Anywhere Government Through Mobile App Competitions

Agencies have used an open data competition approach in their quest to provide anytime, anywhere government. For example, in 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted the Apps for the Environment challenge and has a hub for apps created using EPA data. Here’s an update on challenges hosted by other agencies: The National Institute of Standards

Jacob Parcell

Dec 29, 2015

18F Reflects on Their Most Meaningful Projects in 2015

2015 was a big year for 18F. We almost doubled in size, worked with 28 different agency partners, and released products ranging from Design Method Cards to cloud.gov. Internally, we improved onboarding and our documentation by releasing guides on topics as diverse as content, accessibility, and creating good open source projects.

Melody Kramer

Dec 29, 2015

The Data Briefing: Does the Federal Government Have an Obligation to Educate Open Data Users?

Pop quiz on statistics and data science (answers at the end of the article): 1) I have some data on accidents at railroad crossings. One variable indicates the compass direction a railroad crossing faces (North, Northwest, Northeast, and so on). This variable is a/an: Ordinal Categorical Directional Interval 2) I have some ordinal data that

Bill Brantley

Dec 16, 2015

Challenge App-titude: A Successful Newcomer Offers a Few Tips

The Reference Data Challenge, launched this summer, was a call for innovative approaches to a long-standing role of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to make “critically evaluated reference data available to scientists, engineers and the general public.” This challenge—our first-ever app contest and second prize competition as an agency—had the dual aims

Heather Evans

Dec 15, 2015

The Data Briefing: Help #HackSuicide This Weekend

A month ago, I wrote about the White House’s call for data scientists and app developers to come together to help combat suicide. On December 12, 2015, there will be five hackathons around the U.S. to #HackSuicide. All the hackathons are free and open to the public. Even if you are not a data scientist,

Bill Brantley

Dec 09, 2015

The Data Briefing: The Open Government Data Revolution Is Just Getting Started

Some of you may remember when President Reagan opened America’s Global Positioning System (GPS) data. President Reagan gave all countries access to the GPS data in response to the Soviet Union shooting down Korean Airlines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983. I do not believe that the U.S. realized how much opening up GPS data

Bill Brantley

Dec 02, 2015

Analytics.usa.gov: New Features and More Data

As of writing this post, 25,225 of the 124,878 total visitors on federal government websites participating in the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) are NOT located in the United States. And as a result of

Dec 01, 2015

The Data Briefing: Innovating Health Data at the HHS IDEA Lab

By the time this is published, the United States, along with 160 other countries, will be celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week 2015. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) IDEA Lab is an outstanding example of a federal agency using open data to foster economic growth through empowering federal employees with innovative ideas and opening health data to the private sector.

Bill Brantley

Nov 18, 2015

The Data Briefing: Is That Drug Safe? – The FDA’s RR-Drug R/Shiny App

I (virtually) attended the Third Annual Safety Datapalooza last Thursday and was greatly impressed by the projects and initiatives for public safety. This was a great event, and I am glad that live streaming was provided for those who could not attend in person but have a great interest in using government data for disaster

Bill Brantley

Nov 04, 2015

Empowering the Voice of Citizens at Core of GSA Open Government

We are proud to announce our commitment to the third U.S. National Action Plan for Open Government, released this week at the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Global Summit in Mexico City, Mexico,

Justin Herman

Oct 29, 2015

GSA Open Government Builds Solutions and Gives Voice to Citizens

Our work at the General Services Administration encompass many of the pillars of Open Government, from giving a greater voice to citizens to through Public Participation innovations like Challenge.gov to making the

Phaedra Chrousos

Oct 29, 2015

The Data Briefing: Create an App for Employees with Disabilities

Have you worked with an employee with a disability? Are you an employee with a disability? Then, you know the unique challenges of the average workplace that able-bodied colleagues may never experience. Workplace challenges could be overcome with accommodations such as larger computer monitor displays, wheelchair-accessible office furniture or a voice reader. In some cases,

Bill Brantley

Oct 28, 2015

Gov Analytics Breakdown #2: Mobile Is Bigger than Ever

A review of the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) data confirms what many are already saying: Content is being viewed on mobile devices more than ever before, and the percentage of sessions via mobile devices is growing.

Tim Lowden

Oct 21, 2015

Gov Analytics Breakdown #1 – Browsers: Chrome Takes the Cake

We wanted to take a look at overall browser usage now that DAP has a few years of data, and the changes tell an interesting story. Here’s a breakdown of the percent of total sessions of the top five browsers during the last three years.

Tim Lowden

Oct 15, 2015

The Data Briefing: White House Asks Data Scientists and App Developers to Help Suicide Prevention Efforts

This article describes some of the data sources that could be leveraged for building data analysis and apps to aid in the suicide prevention effort.

Bill Brantley

Oct 07, 2015

Bringing Water Protection into the Modern Age

Information technology is everywhere. How we communicate, and how we share with one another has gone digital, saving paper, time, money, and making it easier to get information faster and more reliably. Forty-three years ago, when the Clean Water Act was enacted, things moved a little slower. But the significance and impact of this important

Cynthia Giles

Oct 01, 2015

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