Andrea DiMaio

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Andrea Di Maio
VP Distinguished Analyst
12 years at Gartner
25 years IT industry

Andrea Di Maio is a vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research, where he focuses on the public sector, with particular reference to e-government strategies, Web 2.0, the business value of IT, open-source software… Read Full Bio

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A Few Questions While Waiting for the Open Government Directive

by Andrea Di Maio  |  September 14, 2009  |  3 Comments

As announced by US Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra during the Gov 2.0 Summit (see NextGov article), the US government is about to release an Open Government Directive, further to President Obama’s executive memo dated January 21st. According to a recent NextGov article,

The directive will lay out a structured schedule for the release of data in a machine-readable format and institute reporting requirements for agencies to describe how they will involve the public in open government initiatives

While the directive is expected to provide some much awaited guidance to agencies about open data, there are a number of important questions that need to be answered

The first two are raised by another NextGov article, asking about what agencies are supposed to do about data stored in PDF format, which is not machine readable, and how far back they should go in time to provide open data (i.e. how about historical archives?).

Here are some additional questions:

  • Will agencies be forced to make all open (and machine readable) data available through data.gov, or will they be able to choose alternative or complementary avenues?
  • Who is responsible for data quality, accuracy and timeliness on web sites – such as data.gov – in case they store copies rather than references to data?
  • Is government responsible for monitoring how open data are being properly used (see previous post)? If so, is that responsibility with data.gov or with each agency?
  • Is government responsible for monitoring whether and where open data are being copied, and how those copies are being used?

Maybe answers to questions like these are already available or will be addressed in some other document. But they are needed, if the vision of realizing value from open government data must scale up from a proof of concept to a basis for government evolution and transformation.

3 Comments »

Category: open government data     Tags: ,

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Twitter Trackbacks for A Few Questions While Waiting for the Open Government Directive [gartner.com] on Topsy.com   September 14, 2009 at 9:00 am

    [...] A Few Questions While Waiting for the Open Government Directive blogs.gartner.com/andrea_dimaio/2009/09/14/a-few-questions-while-waiting-for-the-open-government-directive – view page – cached As announced by US Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra during the Gov 2.0 Summit (see NextGov article), the US government is about to release an Open Government Directive, further to President Obama’s executive memo dated January 21st. — From the page [...]

  • 2 Davied   September 15, 2009 at 3:04 pm

    Beth Noveck went further into the Directive in her speech. See some of her slides on http://gov20s.ning.com/profiles/blogs/de-plannen-van-het-witte-huis

  • 3 Andrea Di Maio   September 15, 2009 at 3:14 pm

    @Davied – Thanks a lot, these are most helpful. However, they do not answer my questions above. I hope the final text will, although I do not expect much. It is good though that responsibility is given to individual agencies.