Presidential Innovation Fellows: Open Data Initiatives
The Presidential Innovation Fellows program pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate on solutions that aim to deliver significant results in six months. These projects have straightforward goals: to improve the lives of the American people, save taxpayer money, and fuel job creation. This is innovation aimed at making a difference for all Americans.
Open Data Initiatives
Stimulating a rising tide of innovation and entrepreneurship that utilizes government data to create tools that help Americans in numerous ways – e.g., apps and services that help people find the right health care provider, identify the college that provides the best value for their money, save money on electricity bills through smarter shopping, or keep their families safe by knowing which products have been recalled.
What is Open Data?
The Open Data Initiatives program aims to “liberate” government data and voluntarily-contributed corporate data to fuel entrepreneurship, improve the lives of Americans in many tangible ways, and create jobs. As a model, decades ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began making weather data available for free electronic download by anyone. Entrepreneurs utilized these data to create weather newscasts, websites, mobile applications, insurance, and much more. Similarly, the government’s decision to make the Global Positioning System (GPS) freely available has fueled a vast array of private sector innovations ranging from navigation systems to precision crop farming, creating massive public benefit and contributing significantly to economic growth. More recently, the Health Data Initiative, launched by the Institute of Medicine and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2010, has opened growing amounts of health-related knowledge and information in computer-readable form from the vaults of the government and publicized the availability of these data to entrepreneurs and innovators. Hundreds of companies and nonprofits have utilized these data to develop new products and services that are helping millions of Americans and creating jobs of the future in the process.
Working closely with the US CTO and an array of agencies, the Open Data Initiative team is continuing to both scale the Health Data Initiative and roll out new open data initiatives in the energy, education, public safety, and nonprofit sectors. These efforts involve both government releasing general data resources in computer-readable form and also private sector organizations voluntarily giving consumers access to their own data (e.g., utilities allowing consumers to download electronic copies of their own electricity usage data) in a manner that rigorously protects privacy. The goal is to stimulate a rising tide of entrepreneurship that utilizes these data to create tools that help Americans find the right health care provider for them, identify the college that provides the best value for their money, save money on their electricity bills through smarter shopping for the right rate plan, keep their families safe by knowing which products have been recalled, and much more – a rising tide of innovation that will also contribute to economic growth and create jobs.
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