Sunlight Labs Pre-Thinks Data.gov

Sunlight Labs, the web development shop of the Sunlight Foundation, runs an occasional series on “Redesigning the Government,” in which they offer redesign and information architecture advice for federal agencies. Today, they’ve conceived a website that doesn’t yet exist, but that Whitehouse CIO Vivek Kundra has promised is in the works: Data.gov, the central repository that will catalog federal bulk data.

Here’s a screen grab of their mockups:

This is precisiely the kind of work I’ve argued that the nonprofit and advocacy sphere needs to be engaged in right now. For decades, a host of think tanks has analyzed public policies and offered menus of solutions for how government operations should run. But some of the key lessons underscored by web technologies are that the presentation of ideas is inextricably linked to their content, and that effective policymaking must go hand-in-hand with effective communication. One of the great promises of this administration is radical transparency for government operations and information, and so there’s every reason for the experts in the tech and think tank worlds to leverage their design and policy knowledge in support of open government data and successful communications.

To that end, the Labs staff makes another key suggestion: Data.gov needs editors who can write about the information available. The site, they argue, “should feature data, blog about data, and perhaps even link off to interesting things that other people are doing with the data that comes from Data.gov.” Moreover, that sort of feedback loop will encourage more policy that drives further transparency.

Tags: Internet, open-government

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