Vivek Kundra, the first, former and only Chief Information Officer of the United States, opened ONA11 in an interview with WBUR-FM (Boston NPR) journalist Tom Ashbrook. Kundra believes his efforts to promote transparency in government have saved U.S. taxpayers more than $3 billion. Not trillions but hey, any little bit helps.
Kundra is a believer that shining a light on inefficiencies in data management is a responsible way to control costs. One way he did that is to move to the cloud – to third party vendors, removing the expense of building, maintenance and management from taxpayers. Too bad that CIO office is empty, with no signs of a new evangelist.
The former U.S. CIO says he modeled his efforts on the stock market: real time, instant transparency, moment by moment. He admits that the 400,000 data sets available at www.data.gov are single silos of data. Rather than build template suggested intersections of data sets, he believes it best left to citizens and journalists to determine which intersections are most valuable to explore. That opens up an opportunity for news organizations and third parties to take multiple data sets, explore overlapping data and intersections to provide more valuable analysis of the data.
He believes journalists would do well to move from the practice of reporting on a point in time and mine the data in new ways, to more deeply understand trends and directions. There’s a battle for the soul of the future of journalism, he said.
For all those data sets, Kundra said there should be 1 million data sets on www.data.gov. Only 600,000 more to go.
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