The Obama Administration’s CIO Steven VanRoekel and CTO Aneesh Chopra announced Data.gov-in-a-box, which includes the initial code for the United States’ Data.gov data portal, as well as partner India’s site India.gov. A full version of the Open Government Platform is expected to be ready by early 2012, enabling other governments to stand up their own open government sites to “promote transparency, improve citizen engagement, and engage application developers in continuously improving these efforts,” according to the news release from VanRoekel and Chopra.
In part, the open source push follows through on U.S. participation in multilateral transparency and governance initiatives through the Open Government Partnership. Government accountability and openness to federal information has also been part of the mission statement from VanRoekel since he took over as CIO in August from the first federal information guru, Vivek Kundra.
Earlier this year, Open Source for America, an organization of tech industry officers gave a failing grade to open source efforts at a majority of U.S. Cabinet-level offices, though lauded others, like the Department of Defense.
For the Open Government Platform repository on Github, click here.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
