Where is Where.gov? A basic tenet of good government is knowing where our 'stuff' is
By Christopher K. Tucker, Sep 23, 2009
We have seen Recovery.gov and Data.gov, but where is Where.gov? Clearly, the Obama administration understands the power of place because it has already thrown interactive maps into the first two applications. Its commitment to place has even resulted in a powerful new approach to budget planning and programming, outlined in an Aug. 11 memo titled “Developing Effective Place-Based Policies for the FY 2011 Budget.”
So why do citizens, civil servants, our uniformed service members and political decision-makers, including the president of the United States, need to go to so many mapping portals to see where things are, only to come up short?
From the lowliest citizen to the president of the United States, we should all be empowered to fire up an application I will call Where.gov. At that portal, you could draw a bounding box on a map, declare a slice of time and instantaneously discover everything our government knows about that place. And we should be able to marshal that data instantaneously to support our needs.
When bad things happen, they happen in places and at times you cannot anticipate. The ability to instantaneously achieve situational awareness is essential. Knowing what risks you face and the resources you have at your disposal at a specific location brings an immediate cost savings in less time spent, fewer errors made and opportunity costs not incurred. Even outside a crisis environment, we are discovering that the location of anything is quickly becoming everything.
Knowing the location of our “stuff” is a basic ingredient of good government. The Obama administration came to Washington with a clarion call for transparency, accountability and transformation of how government does business. Where.gov could help achieve those goals.
It would quickly and clearly demonstrate to everyone which government organizations can properly locate their people, assets, mission challenges and the services they provide — and which cannot. The portal would immediately strike a major blow to the out-of-sight, out-of-mind habits of Washington. Our successes and failures would be placed on the map and made accountable to open and democratic processes, which would inevitably empower people to demand better, more responsive government and encourage public/private partnerships that could lead to a better tomorrow. It would be the ultimate Sunlight Foundation.
Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra, our new federal chief information officer and chief technology officer, respectively, are barnstorming the country advocating the rapid transformation to a government that uses open standards and cloud computing. I couldn’t agree more. Where.gov could take their impulse and transform it into concrete guidance to agencies, telling them to publish all their data to the cloud via Open Geospatial Consortium standards, with security as appropriate.
That approach would not be limited to traditional geospatial data. The Where.gov guidance would finally communicate to agency leaders and their chief financial officers that a basic tenet of good government and effective management is knowing where your stuff is and understanding the places on which your mission must be focused. President Barack Obama understands that place matters in a fundamental way. It’s time for Where.gov.
According to Government Technology editor Tod Newcombe, GIS is the key component in that effort, and thus, the winner.
"The math is simple. According to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget's Federal Enterprise Architecture framework, 74 percent of government data is location based. At the state and local level, the number is even higher: 80 percent, according to several organizations and publications".
The article goes on to discuss an important role that govenment can take on with repect to technology platforms and the benefits that can be realized in both sectors with public-private partnership:
"The summit's program co-chair, Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media Inc., gives two major reasons why government must be viewed as a platform: The public sector built two of the most important digital infrastructures: the Internet and GPS. "The government built these platforms and the private sector ran with them," he concluded. Just as important is the fact that government has also become a major beneficiary of both platforms."
Mike Mahaffie, NSGIC's state representative from Delaware writes on the NSGIC blog that,
"Recognition of the importance of GIS in Government 2.0 is great; but it's up to us as GIS practitioners, to make sure that the work we do meets the needs of an open policy."
As you probably know, numerous web, print, and broadcast "news" items appearing in the past month claimed that the Four Corners survey monument - marking the intersection of AZ, CO, NM, and UT - is in the wrong place. These stories also suggested that the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) is the source of this "discovery." Because these stories contained numerous inaccuracies and erroneously cited NGS as the source, NGS management felt it was important that we issue some clarification/correction information. I was asked to put this together, and I have done so.
I am providing this to you for your own information and also to help you in responding to any inquiries you might have received or will receive regarding this (non) issue.
Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions regarding this effort to get out the real story of the Four Corners monument.
Details of the recent California Court of Appeal's decision in favor of open, low-cost access to GIS base data layers developed by a county government in that state are discussed in an article by Bruce Joffe of the Open Data Consortium posted on the GISCafe website.
Many have viewed this case as a test for the types of barriers and scale of fees that government can charge to provide existing GIS data to interested parties making public records requests. The Courts decision which is consistent with the data sharing philosophy that led to the creation and maintenance of Utah's State Geographic Information Database (SGID), can be viewed on line at http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/H031658.PDF.
Key findings:
The public interest in disclosure outweighs the public interest in nondisclosure.
There is no [California] statutory basis either for copyrighting the GIS basemap or for conditioning its release on a licensing agreement.
