Help Shape the Future of Data.gov

As noted yesterday, the White House has now released the Open Government Directive, providing guidance to agencies and departments about the steps they will have to take to implement the President's transparency, participation, and collaboration agenda.

Going forward, one key element in this agenda is sure to be Data.gov. The portal, launched in May 2009, provides a consolidated portal for downloading federal datasets in machine-readable formats. The Open Government Directive gives Data.gov a starring role in agencies' open government plans, requiring them to:

identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value data sets and register those data sets via Data.gov. These must be data sets not previously available online or in a downloadable format.

The Directive goes on to provide some guidance on what "high-value" really means, but as we all know, the value of data is in the eye of the beholder. In this case, happily, the beholder is you. Recognizing that Data.gov is still in the beginning of what is sure to be a continuous evolution, the Federal CIO Council, which oversees the site, is inviting all interested parties to weigh in on the question: What would you like Data.gov to look like by July 2010?

The site, hosted on the IdeaScale platform, is a classic "online dialogue" model: You can suggest ideas, discuss others' ideas, categorize them, and vote the best ones to the top. The site also provides an opportunity to read the draft Data.gov CONOPS (link to pdf), a pretty interesting document that sheds some light on how Data.gov is being thought about inside OMB and the CIO Council.

This is a neat opportunity to shape a service that, fundamentally, should be guided by the desires and requirements of citizens.