The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) is an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce. The primary mission of NTIS is to collect and organize scientific, technical, engineering, and business information generated by U.S. government-sponsored research and development, for private industry, government, academia, and the public. The systems, equipment, financial structure, and specialized staff skills that NTIS maintains to undertake its primary mission allow it to provide assistance to other agencies requiring such specialized resources.
The United States National Agricultural Library (NAL) is one of the world's largest agricultural research libraries, and serves as a national library of the United States and as the library of the United States Department of Agriculture. Located in Beltsville, Maryland, it is one of five national libraries of the United States. It is also the coordinator for the Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC), a national network of state land-grant institutions and coordinator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) field libraries.
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), part of the United States Department of Transportation, is a government office that compiles, analyzes, and publishes information on the nation's transportation systems across various modes; and strives to improve the DOT's statistical programs through research and the development of guidelines for data collection and analysis. BTS is a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System.
The United States federal civil service is the civilian workforce of the United States federal government's departments and agencies. The federal civil service was established in 1871. U.S. state and local government entities often have comparable civil service systems that are modeled on the national system to varying degrees.
Vivek Kundra is a former American administrator who served as the first chief information officer of the United States from March, 2009 to August, 2011 under President Barack Obama. He is currently the chief operating officer at Sprinklr, a provider of enterprise customer experience management software based in NYC. He was previously a visiting Fellow at Harvard University.
Aneesh Paul Chopra is an American executive who served as the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States. He was appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama and was at the White House through 2012. Chopra previously served as Virginia's Secretary of Technology under Governor Tim Kaine. Chopra was a candidate in 2013 for the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. He is the author of Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government (2014) and co-founder and president of CareJourney. In 2015 he joined Albright Stonebridge Group as a senior advisor.
The federal Chief Information Officer of the United States, also known as the United States Chief Information Officer, is the administrator of the Office of Electronic Government, or the Office of the Federal CIO (OFCIO), which is part of the Office of Management and Budget. The President appoints the Federal CIO. The appointee does not require Senate confirmation. It was created by the E-Government Act of 2002.
The Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation was an office new to the Obama Administration, created within the White House, to catalyze new and innovative ways of encouraging government to do business differently. Its first director was the economist Sonal Shah. The final director was David Wilkinson.
data.gov.uk is a UK Government project to make available non-personal UK government data as open data. It was launched as closed beta in 30 September 2009, and publicly launched in January 2010. As of February 2015, it contained over 19,343 datasets, rising to over 40,000 in 2017, and more than 47,000 by 2023. data.gov.uk is listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data.org.
The National Transportation Library (NTL) maintains and facilitates access to information necessary for transportation decision-making in government and coordinates with public and private transportation libraries and information providers to improve information sharing among the transportation community. It is currently under the administration of the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS).
Citizen sourcing is the government adoption of crowdsourcing techniques for the purposes of (1) enlisting citizens in the design and execution of government services and (2) tapping into the citizenry's collective intelligence for solutions and situational awareness. Applications of citizen sourcing include:
Lasting from November 15, 2010 to November 17, 2010, The International Open Government Data Conference was a conference sponsored by the United States General Services Administration and hosted by the United States Department of Commerce on the subject of open datasets globally, in coalition with the United States' previously opened data.gov.
Nick Sinai is a venture capitalist, adjunct faculty at Harvard Kennedy School, author, and a former senior official in the Obama Administration.
Open data in the United States refers to the Federal government of the United States' perspectives, policies, and practices regarding open data.
Apps.gov was a cloud storefront run by the U.S. General Services Administration to assist federal agencies in purchasing cloud computing services from the marketplace. The website was initially launched in 2009 under the direction of former Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, but was first closed down in 2012 in order to "streamline" procurement and amid reports of low usage. The service was relaunched at the 2016 SXSW festival by a team of Presidential Innovation Fellows following President Obama's keynote address on using technology to improve government. The site has not been available since early 2019, though no official shutdown was ever announced.
A machine-readable document is a document whose content can be readily processed by computers. Such documents are distinguished from more general machine-readable data by virtue of having further structure to provide the necessary context to support the business processes for which they are created.
Open by Default, as widely used in the contexts of Open Government and Open Data, is the principle in which government makes its data accessible to the public by default, unless there is a sufficient justification to explain that greater public interest may be at stake, as a result of disclosure. Since the principle empowers the public's right to know and capacity to oversee government activities, it is closely associated with government transparency, civic engagement, and e-governance in organizing public life. In many cases, the principle is accompanied with the technological commitment to create "metadata standardization for all datasets, publication of a machine-readable data catalogue or inventory of both released and to-be released datasets ... (and) use of open licenses."
The U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking was a 15-member agency in the federal government charged by the US Congress and the President with examining how government could better use its existing data to provide evidence for future government decisions.
The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act is a United States law that establishes processes for the federal government to modernize its data management practices, evidence-building functions, and statistical efficiency to inform policy decisions. The Evidence Act contains four parts ("titles"), which address evidence capacity, open data, and data confidentiality.
Richard Y. Wang is the Founder and Executive Director of the Chief Data Officer and Information Quality (CDOIQ) Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wang is widely acknowledged as the "Founder of Information Quality"—the scholar who made Information Quality an established field. For the past three decades, he advocated that the importance of information quality must be embraced at the highest level of organizations. He championed and led a movement to establish the position of Chief Data Officers in all organizations. His pioneering work culminated in a wide-scale adoption of the Chief Data Officer role worldwide. Notably, in 2019, the U.S. Congress enacted the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 into law, which statutorily mandated all federal agencies to establish and appoint a CDO for their agency.
