INDUSTRY INSIGHT

The open, efficient, machine-readable government

When a retired billionaire with good intentions and time on his hands spends $10 million on a website to make government performance data comprehensible to the public, people take notice. When compliance with a law would enable development of such services for far less money, nobody (besides the Government Accountability Office) seems to pay much attention.

As noted on the USAFacts site, funded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, its main goal is to report the outcomes of public expenditures. That will become much easier when agencies comply with section 10 of the Government Performance and Results Modernization Act (GPRAMA), which requires them to publish their performance reports in machine-readable format like Strategy Markup Language (StratML, ISO 17469-1 and ANSI/AIIM 22:2017).

In the meantime, Alex Howard of the Sunlight Foundation noted Ballmer’s project seems disconnected from open government data projects -- such as the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and the Data.gov, USASpending, and Performance.gov sites -- and shows no apparent awareness of the upcoming publication of financial information required by the Data Act. However, for government policymakers the more relevant issue is why agencies have not made more progress complying with law and policy designed to facilitate reuse of public data so that sites and services like USAFacts don’t cost so much to develop and support.

Hudson Hollister of the Data Coalition has suggested the cost of the USAFacts site is roughly equivalent to what agencies have spent transforming government information into open formats. It is noteworthy, however, that neither the data on the Peformance.gov site nor the OGP national action plans are being published in open, standard, machine-readable format (read here for the distinction between digitization and machine readability). They are obvious candidates to demonstrate leadership by example in support of President Barack Obama’s directive establishing machine-readability as the default for government information, as well as the Office of Management and Budget’s Circular A-130, which directs agencies to use open data standards whenever possible.

Moreover, a key point made by government public engagement specialists is that many agencies fail to give sufficient thought to who needs their services, a shortcoming inconsistent with the E-Government Act of 2002 (eGov Act), which requires agencies to:

Work together to link their performance goals to key groups and

Adopt open standards enabling the organization and categorization of information in a way that is searchable electronically and interoperable across agencies.

Failure to comply with those provisions of the law has resulted in the proliferation of data stovepipe performance reporting “dashboards” across government. Meanwhile, the George W. Bush administration’s ExpectMore.gov site was retired and replaced with the Performance.gov site, which is itself now being reengineered, meaning that performance data cannot be efficiently and effectively tracked across the changing political administrations.

Commenting on the need for public engagement, Dan Chenok of IBM’s Center for the Business of Government noted agencies cannot deliver on their missions without input and feedback from stakeholders. When agencies comply with GPRAMA, vendors, media outlets and service providers -- like IBM, USAFacts, DataUSA, FCW, GCN and many others -- will be empowered to enable citizens to engage far more efficiently in support of public objectives than ever before possible.