Quick Demonstration Showing The Benefits of The White House Digital Strategy

I wanted to share a quick visualization of the beneifts of Barack Obama's Presidential directive that every Federal Government agency should have an API, following Executive Order 13571, and part of the Whitehouse CIO's strategy, entitled "Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People" and the potential of the recent Open Data Executive Order and accompanying Open Data Policy.

Each federal agency should have three things available online at their domain:

  • agency.gov/digitalstrategy/
  • agency.gov/data
  • agency.gov/developers/

Those are three pretty important signals in the API space.  This represents each agencies technology roadmap, data and developer resources. Which can be some pretty interesting signals for the overall health of a federal agency.

To demonstrate, let's look at the Department of Energy.

Let's go to:  http://energy.gov/digitalstrategy

 

Next:  http://energy.gov/data/

Then:  http://energy.gov/data/

After the Department of Energy, let's take a look at another agency, like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Let's go to:  http://irs.gov/digitalstrategy


Next:  http://irs.gov/data


Then:  http://irs.gov/developer


Granted, these are two very different agencies. But I can't help but think that the IRS should hand out a copy of the White House Open Data Policy internally, and figure out how they can begin to let a little light into their operations and culture.