 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 47 272,768 389,933
Applications and mashups 0 237 1,079
developed by the public and
government
Data set downloads 0 652,412 2,348,928
Nations establishing open data 0 6 21
sites
States offering open data sites 0 8 29
Cities in North America with 0 8 11
open data sites
16 FY 2011 GSA • OCSIT ANNUAL REPORT

Achievements:
 Launched new Data.gov communities,
specialized sections of the website dedicated Communities are able to
to bringing together data suppliers and data aggregate content, collaboration
consumers around a specific, cross-agency capabilities, and data across
topic. These active communities provide agencies. With 6 communities
citizens with a place to find data on their today, including energy, health,
topics of interest, access apps and tools that law and 4 more expected in the
bring that data to life, read blogs from next few months, this yields a
contributors from agencies like HHS and the potential savings of 5.5M.
Department of Energy, and use discussion
forums.
 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