  The Terms of Service Agreements and the Open Government Public 

Engagement Tool give federal agencies policy-compliant, proven solutions that 
enable them to communicate openly and effectively with the public.  

  The Challenges and Prizes Platform, challenge.gov, allows agencies to solicit 

innovative ideas and practical solutions from the public, backed by incentives that 
encourage the public to participate and compete.  

  The Citizen Engagement Platform expands agencies’ ability to use social media 

tools that are secure, tested, and accessible to persons with disabilities.  

  The Business Breakthrough program helps businesses better understand the 

intricacies of the federal market, and learn more about ways they can use GSA’s 
contracting vehicles to grow. 

  ePublications makes popular government publications available for free via 

electronic download in a variety of e-publication formats.   

President Obama highlighted his Administration’s commitment to open government 
when he unveiled the U.S. National Action Plan on September 20, 2011 at the United 
Nations. The plan lays out the key challenges that will be addressed in the open 
government space. At the same time, The Obama Administration’s Commitment to 
Open Government: A Status Report, was released, which outlines the Administration’s 
major Open Government initiatives, summarizes the progress made on those initiatives, 
and explains how the Administration will continue to implement them over the next 
months and years.   

GSA’s excellent work is highlighted with Data.gov, Challenge.gov, and other OCSIT 
initiatives as key components. GSA will keep openness as an operational standard. 
Details on how GSA will implement its Open Government Plan and flagship initiatives 
are available via the Open Government Dashboard published on the agency's Open 
Government web page: http://GSA.gov/Open.   

Data.gov 

We are the executive lead and project manager for Data.gov, which is the flagship 
initiative of the Administration’s Open Government Directive. Its goal is to make the 
federal government transparent and open through clear, accessible, and easy-to-use 
online government data. Data.gov increases public access to high-value, machine-
readable data sets generated by the federal government’s executive branch.  

FY 2011 GSA • OCSIT ANNUAL REPORT 15 

 
 
 
 
 
The Data.gov team makes public-sector data available to everyone and creates and 
maintains a central directory for all data published by federal agencies. We continue to 
provide value to the public through an enhanced delivery channel, and deployment of a 
shared data set hosting environment. Data.gov empowers the public by fundamentally 
changing the way government shares its data, and creates value through applications 
for daily use. Data.gov increases the public’s ability to easily find, download, and use 
data sets that the federal government has generated. 

Launch:  

1 Year: 

FY 2010 

May 21, 2009

May 21, 2010 

Sept. 30, 2011 

Total data sets available 

Applications and mashups 
developed by the public and 
government 

Data set downloads 

Nations establishing open data 
sites 

States offering open data sites 

Cities in North America with 
open data sites 

47 

0 

0 

0 

0 

0 

16  FY 2011 GSA • OCSIT ANNUAL REPORT 

272,768 

389,933 

237 

1,079 

652,412 

2,348,928 

6 

8 

8 

21 

29 

11 

 
 
Achievements:  

  Launched new Data.gov communities, 

specialized sections of the website dedicated 
to bringing together data suppliers and data 
consumers around a specific, cross-agency 
topic. These active communities provide 
citizens with a place to find data on their 
topics of interest, access apps and tools that 
bring that data to life, read blogs from 
contributors from agencies like HHS and the 
Department of Energy, and use discussion 
forums. 

Communities are able to 
aggregate content, collaboration 
capabilities, and data across 
agencies. With 6 communities 
today, including energy, health, 
law and 4 more expected in the 
next few months, this yields a 
potential savings of 5.5M. 

  Since the United States launched this capability, seven other national 

governments have launched their versions – and more are expected. India and 
the United States are working on Data.gov-in-a-Box. This initiative seeks to help 
interested countries promote transparency, improve citizens’ engagement, and 
strengthen public service delivery by increasing citizens’ access to public 
information. For the Data.gov-in-a-Box effort, technical experts from India and the 
United States share respective best practices, ideas and experiences to create 
an open-source, integrated version of Data.gov that will provide citizens with 
open government data and public information in a usable format. Data.gov-in-a-
Box will provide an integrated, open-source platform, free of charge and 
intellectual property constraints that any government can use. Also, this effort will 
issue challenges and other citizen engagement initiatives to encourage citizens 
of both countries to develop new applications for global use. We plan to make 
Data.gov-in-a-Box available by early 2012. 

  Launched a new Interactive Catalog, a cloud-based capability that provides a 
better interface to help citizens find and use the data they are looking for. It is 
based on a modular, cloud-based platform architecture, so it is available 
anywhere, anytime, is secure and backed-up, without the expense of dedicated 
government servers. All agencies can load their data, getting easy access to the 
cloud and allowing smaller agencies to host large amounts of data at a 
reasonable cost. Application developers will be able to access the data in real-
time (versus downloading files) through open, consistent, ubiquitous, standards-
based Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), enabling them to tailor 
applications to use only the data they need (promoting mobile apps), and 
enabling real-time updates for always-fresh data. The new platform also makes it 
easy to embed data from Data.Gov on blogs, websites and social media pages. 

FY 2011 GSA • OCSIT ANNUAL REPORT 17 

 
 
 
