The White House people mentioned several names to me. I wasn't blown away with the list. I suspect that they need to find a real successor to Vivek. This made me more nervous about Data.gov
What do we "little people" do when someone with this guy's talent resigns because he is doing such a great job saving taxpayer's billions and the Congress or Executive branch cuts his budget from $30+billion to $8+billion? Please don't tell me to contact my senator/congressperson. You and I both know that's futile. I just can't stand hearing about this type of activity in Washington. How does one help to keep a voice like this from being silenced?
The sad thing is that we were talking about $35 million--when billions could be saved. I am as unhappy about this as you are as you can judge by the pessimistic tone of my article.
Yes, that is a great question and you've hit the nail on the head as to how to fix this problem. Entrepreneurs need to chip in and solve the governments--and society's problems.
The challenge is that unless the Government provides the data, there is little that can be done. That's why it starts with Uncle Sam and we need to keep up the pressure.
Yes, the answer is startups. But the Government needs to provide the public the data that it owns. President Obama has said as much. We need to hold him to his word.
The problem is that the people making the funding decisions--the political leaders, don't understand the importance and value of this program. That is why they cut funding. We should be putting all the effort we can into this, so that entrepreneurs can do their magic and build innovative solutions.
Unless Government departments make the data available, no outside entity can do anything. Vivek Kundra was doing all the right things. Once the data is available. then the private sector can take over--but not until then.
Here is the problem: the people who own the legacy systems often fear for their jobs if they give their data away. What happens when entrepreneurs from all over the world build systems and software that are a hundred times better than the junk they are maintaining and cost a fraction to run--that is the fear.
So the pressure has to come top down from our political leaders, and bottoms up from the electorate. We are wasting tens of billions of dollars at the city and state level.
That's a great question. And that is what Vivek Kundra was focused on. With him gone, who is going to lead this charge for us? In short, the data opening can't be a bottoms up effort, it has to be top down, because government employees control access to all this.
The President needs to follow up his words with action--make his administrators do it, fund the websites, etc.
That is a totally different topic from OpenGov, but I have written extensively about this. You can find my articles and research on my website.
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