Government Hopes to Help Create New Solutions Through Data Release

Government agencies will release data onto their websites instead of waiting for people to ask for it, Aneesh Chopra said at a panel discussion Wednesday. Chopra was the White House chief technology officer until Monday. “You don’t have to force someone to go find it by coming to Washington, even virtually,” he said.

The panel coincided with the White House release of the Open Innovator’s Toolkit. The toolkit includes 20 pieces of advice for finding and using data from government websites. The toolkit is part of President Barack Obama’s open government initiative. The website includes already-released data sets and a scorecard rating for each agency. The agencies have data available on open government section of their websites.

Part of the initiative will also be to continue application competitions similar to one at the Department of Health and Human Services that resulted in the “Apps Against Abuse” challenge. The national challenge was to design an application with information about sexual assault and teen dating violence...