Open Gov Summit: Aneesh Chopra

I’m here at the National Archives attending the Open Government Research and Development Summit, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Whitehouse. It’s a series of panel discussions to address questions about the impact and future directions of Obama’s open gov initiative, in particular how to develop a deeper research agenda with the resulting gov data (see the schedule here).

Aneesh Chopra, our country’s first CTO, gave a framing talk in which he listed 5 questions he’d like to have answered through this workshop.

1. big data: how strengthen capacity to understand massive data?
2. new products: what constitutes high value data?
3. open platforms: what are the policy implications of enabling 3rd party apps?
4. international collaboration: what models translate to strengthen democracy internationally?
5. digital norms: what works and what doesn’t work in public engagement?

He hopes the rest of the workshop will not only address these questions and coalesce around recommendations. Chopra wants to be able to set innovation prizes to move towards solutions to these questions.