Important topics. That is coming up in october. We have a giant delegation, both government and civil society, planning to go. If youre interested, youre all invited. Certainly lots of topics important to us will be discussed. So back to open data and the United States. I mentioned that in 2013, president obama issued an open order eo, executive order, for default information. Accompanying that was the open data policy, which we refer to as m1313 for you government nerds in the room. That directs agencies to manage information as an asset. And of course that doesnt happen overnight, right . For the last two years we have been working really hard with our agencies to move towards managing information as an asset. So i mentioned data. Gov. There is a screen shot of the data. Gov home page. 160,000 data sets across all sectors. The data. Gov site has incredible resources and is fantastic if you havent spent much time there. Another effort that we that the administration launched into quickly about a year ago, may of 2014, was publishing an open data action plan. So we have an open Government Action plan. And all the federal agency have their own open Government Action plans. So the United States published an open data plan as part of the work were doing globally in open data. Work were doing in open data. So that has been an interesting document to try to deliver against as well. Another thing ill mention is project open data which is a site that the white house created to aid agencies and really anyone into managing their data and providing resources and assistance and shared best practices to assist with that. Let me give a few examples of how the United States is driving open data, and actually how we link that back to our National Action plans. One topic i chose topics that relate to the financial transparency space. Or tried to at least, but they may not be on everyones radar. The first is the extractive industrys transparency initiative. Extractive industries is essentially where were tracking the revenues received for the Natural Resources that come from u. S. Lands. So oil and gas and timber and everything else. This site, the eiti site, the links there on the slide, was, first of all, beautifully created by our colleagues at 18f, which is part of gfa, thank you. And done in Great Partnership with the department of interior, which is the subject matter owner of this space. Interior was very eager to join the extractive industrys transparency initiative. But we didnt meet all the criteria out of the gates. They have been working to get us there. We are on track to be a valid member country, which is fantastic. One of the key criteria was to capture our data about this work and to be able to provide that data to the public. So through the open data work we have been prioritizing in the u. S. , we have been not only to open the data and make it available but put it on this beautiful site that can help anyone visualize and use the data, download that data, take it with them and manipulate it on their own to really see whats happening in this line of work. Another great example is foreignassistance. Gov. The United States has an ambitious foreign assistance agenda. It involves lots and lots of money. There are a lot of interested people who want to track where those funds go, how they are spent, et cetera. And so, again, our friends at gsa have been incredibly helpful working with the state department on the foreign assistance site, and many other agencies that record this kind of data to find the data, to clean the data. Sometimes thats the most difficult and least fun part of this, cleaning the data to make sure its accurate and usable, and to make that data available. And, again, available to be visualized used and downloaded and have taken with you in your own way through this foreign assistance dot gov site. It just relaunched. It is another beautiful way in which we can open data and make it easy for just about anyone to figure it out and use it. So next stop on the agenda for new websites or refreshed websites to make more data available, to make better data available, and to provide it in a beautiful user friendly way is usaspending. Gov. My colleague, dave, will talk more about that and the improvements that are coming with usaspending. Gov. I will talk about it actually from the process perspective that i have gotten to see wearing my open Government Initiative hat. I thought the process of the spending team out of treasury and supported of course by colleagues clout the agency has been amazing. It has been an open and participantity process. It something we dont see in policy making and would love to see more of. As that team has been trying to build improvements into the site, they have at every step along the way, sought feedback from civil society, those Key Stakeholders that we would be remiss to leave out of these conversations. And i think its been incredibly useful as an example for all of us working even in other sectors and spaces to see how successful this engagement has been and how open it has been leading into where we are headed next. So i will stop there. We will look forward to hearing where we are headed next from my colleagues at the table. [ applause ] im here to talk about how i everybody, Vicki Mcfadden here. Im with the gsa chief Customer Officer team and here to speak a little bit about how gsa is helping agencies get started when it comes to data. I have been with gsa a long time, about nine years. It always surprises me that were kind of this unknown organization that operates a little bit behind the scenes. But we have a really kind of sexy mission, where we try things first for government, and then help other agencies get started and leverage a lot of our lessons learned, so the nice thing about gsa there withen eos, executive orders that come out of the white house. We test them and help other agencies get started. In the last administration there has been a lot of focus around cloud, open data, and Citizen Experience. Gsa is a great place for those projects to get started and we can leverage the work were doing for other agencies. I wanted to pick up the conversation a little bit about some of the specific work that has been happening and explain a few pilots that have been launched recently, that we are excited about and hold promise for the future. So around particularly open data, gsa does manage the data. Gov platform, which has been around for quite some time and has hundreds of thousands of data sets on there that are kind of exciting because they are spurring entrepreneurialship. Private companies can go on there and create new businesses off of this now open government data. They are helping consumers make better decisions. Cfpb released all the consumer complaints on their banks. Every single comment that has come in is now open to the public. So you can make better decisions about your banking experience. Even airlines that are on time, not on time, thats all available on data. Gov. Its a great platform for entrepreneurialsh entrepreneurialship, scientific discovery, participatory government with citizens, so its a great platform that gsa manages on behalf of the other government. In terms of, you know, whats coming up next is the platform is still, as you guys are aware, data quality continues to be an issue across some of the data sets. So gsa is working on cleaning up some of the data sets. Make it more easily navigable it standardize some of the fields to make it more easily navigable by citizens and easier for them to access in usable ways. We recently added Api Technology so its a little easier to interact with the website now. Another big focus has been around improving the Citizen Experience on their interactions with government. It has been a big push for the chief Customer Office. We were the first chief Customer Office in government and were really trying to we have been around for about a year. We are trying to find ways to collect a voice of the citizen data and use that information in meaningful ways to improve the delivery to citizens on their interactions with government. We have a small team. Were pushing hard in a few areas. Were excited to announce a couple of pilots that have come out earlier this summer. One is called feedback usa. We went to a listening tour across agencies and heard that they have pretty good information on their interaction with citizens through Contact Centers and with their web transactions. When it came to inperson physical experiences with agencies, it was basically a black hole of where they didnt have data on Citizen Experience. So we launched a pilot recently with a few agencies. And its going to be a physical kiosk where as you go through your tsa Airport Security experience or go to the state department to get a new passport, you can touch a happy face button and give Realtime Data on your experience. Its been really exciting so far. We have only had it open two or three weeks. We are getting thousands of data points a day. We are starting to see really meaningful trends with places like ssa. Theyre seeing that mondays at noon are crazy. The satisfaction plummets. So theres really simple things they can do. Like the dmv. Put a note on the website that you can expect higher than normal traffic levels and expect some wait time if you go to an ssa office on monday at noon. Were trying to get the citizen Data Collected in reasonable ways and bring it back to agencies so that they can improve their services. So thats a new pilot. It is focusing on inperson transactions now. We would love to open it up to the public and share this data publicly. And future generations of the pilot. We are also looking at ways to get standardized transactional data from the websites. If you go on to complete a College Application form or anything like that, they would get citizen transactional data there, which is exciting for us. Another pilot that recently launched is yelp for government. Another thing gsa is we negotiate all the terms of services for social media to allow other agencies to use social media platforms to interact with the public. So twitter, facebook, et cetera. We just negotiated yelp. Which is exciting because theres a lot of yelp pages already established for agencies, but the agencies had no way of logging on, claiming those sites as real websites and using those platforms to interact with citizens. So now they have the ability to do that if they have the capacity and band width to actually use the platforms themselves. Gsa in our courthouses will be opening a pilot to open up all of our courthouse sites. Allowing attendants to give us feedback on the building, their experience there and use the data in realtime. The nice thing is there are a lot of platforms that lay on top of yelp. Property managers can receive a text message when someone leaves a comment. They can respond in real time. That is another exciting pilot to show how the government can interact with citizens in real time, which is fun, because we are used to these annual static, standard surveys that take a long time. It is way more exciting to get data in real time and use that. And then of course another citizen facing platform that we offered to other agencies for free is the digital analytics program. You can request go to analytics. Usa. Gov. It is basically googlefree software we can install on every government website so agencies can see the traffic to their site, who is coming, the browsers that are coming, how long people are staying, where they are coming from. It allows them the ability to search and navigate those sites through this platform. The last area i wanted to talk about is another exciting startup within gsa, again, us testing things first for government. Learning some lessons along the way and then rolling it out. It is the 18f programqop which a digital startup at gsa. It has been around a little over a year. And basically their mission is to help agencies Design Software in a smarter way. Again, ive been around government for a long time. We typically set up really long contracts and wait five or six years before we see a beta for the project, and we can make adjustments. At that point its no longer relevant. We can go in and design websites in an agile human Design Center way. They are helping agencies get started. We are also thinking of it as a hub and spoke model. The hub is gsa, we can come up with playbooks, negotiate terms for common tools that Developers Need in government. And then we can encourage other agencies to create their own Digital Service teams that relate back to the 18f hub that partners with the white house quite closely, the usds team. Digital teams are popping up at the va and other agencies to help further this mission, which is really exciting. One of the projects for 18f that recently rolled out is the college scorecard. This is a great example of how 18f has been able to help an agency unleash their data. They went with treasury and department of education and basically were able to come through 18 years of data across 8,000 different schools and universities and service all of that in a meaningful way so people who are applying to colleges can make better decisions about the university they are thinking about going to. It shows percentage of people who graduate, starting salary, all of that. So it is really an exciting case of a way we can take the smart Digital Service teams who can work across the white house, gsa, and agencies to really unleash their data in meaningful ways. Thats a couple examples how gsa is helping to move the needle. I will have questions later in the conversation. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you. And i want to thank hudson and the Data Transparency Coalition for sponsoring us and having us here. These are important discussions. We are pleased to be part of it. I want to do a couple things. One, i want to give a quick little background on the data act. The second is about our approach to implementation, a few accomplishments and close with an invitation. The data act, as many of you know, passed in may of 2014. I would say this is i cant say that everyone was wildly enthusiastic. This is a pretty significant effort to move the federal government to increase transparency. Dave mater and i have been i think enormously impressed with with how much progress we have made in the last year. I will talk more about those accomplishments in a second. I think some of the key things we have been able to do is convince the federal community that there are really a number of use cases and good reasons why the federal government needs to be more open and transparent in the federal spending area. In previous discussion there was questions about how can you get access to data . One of the challenges you find data is sioled in so many different systems. Yeah, we can be sitting next to each other. Vicki may have access to a system that i dont. Were both in the same organization. We would be much better if both of us had access to the same information to make decisions. We talked about the use of the data act as better data, better decisions, better government. I think there is a fair amount of truth to that. It is the reason why the federal government needs to move forward to better understand how were spending the taxpayers dollars. At the same time the public has a right to know about what were doing. That goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson talking about, you know, the average person should be able to understand the finances of the United States government to be able to understand where the spending is occurring, looking for fraud and abuse. The ig community has that same interest. Congress has the same interest with respect to oversight. All of those are really important things. But those are things that often may not motivate in and of themselves. Thats why it has been so important to talk to the federal community. I think we have been very successful why it is important to be moving forward. We have 57 data standards. This we issued 57 data standards, and this is important for a number of reasons. This one of the themes throughout my discussion. In the past when the government looks as a Big Initiative like this, we tend to want to build things. Build big systems and make people do things. We spend a lot of time. We do a very itterative process or sort of waterfall process along the way. Weve looked at this effort. We tried to look at it differently. We tried to look at it as a data centric effort. Which is the agency, the data exists already within the agencies and so our job is not necessarily to change that data but it is to unlock it and to capture it. Rather than building a new system, we talked about tagging the data, looking across the various systems within government, finding where the data exists, extracting it and presenting it in a way that the public can use and decisionmakers can use. Its a different approach. It is a much less expensive approach. So when you have this iterative, this agile process where youre constantly doing things quickly and rather than a traditional waterfall approach, you fail fast, oftentimes a few folks will talk about, and you learn quickly about how things are going. We have had a number of pilots that are under way right now, and i would say that we are very pleased with the initial results on the pilots. With our ability to take this concept and execute it and show you can extract data from the systems where they reside and present it in a meaningful way. Theres lots of you who are eager to help with that presentation process. And i think this is something that came up in one of the earlier panels. If the data is there, people will figure out ways to make it more usable to the public at large. We are already seeing that. Were seeing that in tools that are very inexpensive to actuly do that. That is also very encouraging. So data centric, agency focused. We want to make sure