About Us

The Data Coalition is an initiative of the non-profit Data Foundation. The membership-based initiative facilitates a strong national data community and advocates for responsible policies to make government data high-quality, accessible, and usable. The Data Coalition’s work unites the data communities that focus on data science, management, evaluation, statistics, and technology, including individuals in companies, nonprofit organizations, and academia.

When government’s data are available for use, decision-makers in government and the private sector realize benefits that strengthen the American economy and improve our society. The opportunities for improvement are vast and include empowerment of chief data officers, evaluation officers, and statistical officials; adoption of data standards to enable comparability and enhance quality; publication of machine-readable data to improve usefulness; and renewed focus on mechanisms that accommodate appropriate levels of access to government data, including open data.

Better using government’s data will transform society’s capabilities to generate insights that can be used to hold government programs accountable, improve the efficiency of tax dollars, and strengthen the private sector’s investments to best meet consumer needs. If successful, the Data Coalition Initiative’s efforts also help reduce compliance costs for regulated entities, provide more information about how government operates to the American public, and strengthen the democratic system.

The Data Coalition Initiative supports chief data officers across the federal government who focus on managing government data and continuously improve data quality. Recognizing the many types of data users, the initiative promotes an environment in which analysis of government data provides information as a strategic and a vital asset for the American people.

In the course of our work, the Data Coalition Initiative advocates for appropriate data standards and access mechanisms, promotes the need for sufficient resources for data quality and evaluation activities, educates government leaders and stakeholders about the potential benefits of better data policy, and convenes the data community to support solutions that drive needed transformation in our approaches to using data.

Beginning in 2021, the Data Coalition is an initiative of the Data Foundation, which is registered as a nonprofit corporation in the District of Columbia and recognized by the Internal Revenue Service under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.