Data Coalition Co-Hosts Public Forum on Federal Data Strategy
On November 8, the Data Coalition joined the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Office of Management and Budget to host a public forum discussing the Federal Data Strategy. The second in a series on the strategy, this forum allowed the public, businesses and other stakeholders to comment on the recently published draft set of practices.
Announcements DATA Act Data Coalition Events Grant Reporting Members Noteworthy OMB Open Data USASpending.gov
The transparency of IT spending will improve greatly when TBM is implemented across the federal government. Standardization of IT data will encourage organizations to benchmark their spending compared to other federal organizations and even commercial ones.
The DATA Act was a significant piece of legislation that required the federal government to adopt a single data structure for spending information along with a goal of bringing together all spending information whether it be contract, loans or grants into one unified data set that would be easily searchable by the public.
We now have a full year’s worth of standardized spending data under the DATA Act of 2014. This has quietly been the largest federal financial data effort since the implementation of the CFO Act of 1990.
Progress in RegTech has been seen in the private sector as access to quality data improve. This progress has not been mirrored in the private sector here in the United States, but the potential to improve government efficiency is not far off. 
We’ve just released our 2018 Policy Agenda - our plan for the reforms that will turbocharge the data transformation this year.
What a year it’s been so far! The Data Coalition is leading the push for the policy changes that are needed to transform government information into open data. The first half of 2017 has been jam-packed with policy and event milestones. And we’re continuing to grow our community. 
Last week, on Feb. 2, leaders from 22 tech companies fanned out across Capitol Hill. We crossed from Senate office buildings to House, and back again. We sat down with eight members of Congress and nine groups of staffers. We walked nearly ten miles. We ended our fourteen-hour day with a well-deserved beer. To enact our wonky agenda and realize our ambitious vision, we may have to invest many more Groundhog Days. But that’s okay. With each year of the same Capitol Hill treks and similar policy chats, real change is happening.
Data standards in federal spending are no small task - given the complexity of federal appropriations and the multitude of spending by agency programs currently tracked through legacy systems that have been built over the past 25 years. Simply agreeing on terminology for terms used across contracts, grants, and loans is a significant step forward. But under the DATA Act, the federal government has done exactly that.
When it passed the DATA Act two years ago, Congress cited the need for the federal government to be more transparent to its people. That’s quite correct: once federal spending is published as fully-standardized, open data - instead of documents - it’ll be easier for taxpayers to understand what their government is doing. The Data Coalition and Esri will be exploring this story over breakfast on Tuesday, April 26, at 1776 Crystal City. Join us!