About the Democratizing Our Data platform
Why the platform exists
Government agencies have been legislatively charged with showing how their data are used for evidence-based policy making (Section 202c of the Foundations for Evidence-based Policymaking Act of 2018). They are specifically required to
• Facilitate collaboration with non-Government entities (including businesses), researchers, and the public for the purpose of understanding how data users value and use government data
• Engage the public in using public data assets of the agency and encourage collaboration by publishing on the website of the agency, on a regular basis (not less than annually), information on the usage of such assets by non-Government users
• Assist the public in expanding the use of public data assets
How the platform came to be
The project is joint work with New York University, Elsevier, Johns Hopkins Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center. It developed from the Show Us the Data Kaggle competition and conference, and the Rich Context project. It has been generously supported by several philanthropic foundations - the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Schmidt Futures - as well as Federal agencies - the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, the US Department of Agriculture, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Technology Innovation and Partnership Directorate at NSF
