It’s all about the data. Or is it?
I attended the NRO CTO Innovation Showcase yesterday and today. Overall, a great event with a bunch of forward thinking speakers. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra kicked things off yesterday, followed by IBM’s own Jeff Jonas and then Dr. Vint Cerf from Google. Today we heard Dion Hinchcliffe, from Hinchcliffe & Associates, David Stephenson, author of "Democratizing Data," and then closed things out with a panel discussion on the use of open source in DoD.
Although I didn’t catch all of the speakers, almost everything I did catch was about opening up data and seeing where it would take us. Apps for Democracy and Data.gov were commonly cited examples, and some very interesting graphics were presented showing the success of commercial platforms like Facebook and how their growth coincided with their decision to open up APIs. (And as for how to use that data, IBM Mashup Center even got a nice plug from Dion Hinchcliffe!)
The underlying message was quite clear. This is happening on the internet, with both public and private data. The return on investment is huge. But now we need to make the effort to ensure the same thing happens inside government agencies, not just externally. The advantage is we have access to even richer data sets. The challenge, however, is getting the tools to take advantage of that data to the government knowledge workers. We have very smart subject matter experts in these agencies, and given the right tools and data, they can truly change our level of understanding of the world. But the way things work today, applications and users are too locked down to successfully take advantage of that data. Nearly everyone I have spoken to about mashups presents this same challenge. The tools are there. The data is getting there. That missing piece, the buy-in to move forward and let users see where the data can take them, is the next big challenge.
PS – If you aren’t already following them @nrocto is up on Twitter and tweeting away. Great job organizing the event!
