Hats off to two Agriculture Department divisions for seeking feedback Thursday and Friday about how and whether their open data are being used by researchers and other data consumers.
In the push to make government data more accessible to the public, phase two -- figuring out what data the public wants, what data it's using and what effect that’s having -- sometimes gets skipped.
USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service tweeted around 10 a.m. Friday asking what use the public was getting from its census data. (Scroll down to see the tweet).
Have you used our Ag Census #data to build an app, tool or site? Let us know with a tweet! ow.ly/jilQK #Gov20 #OpenGov
— USDA-NASS (@usda_nass) March 22, 2013
Note this response from the University of Kentucky’s Agriculture College.
@usda_nass We built #county #data profiles for all 120 #Kentucky counties. Ours users love them! www2.ca.uky.edu/CEDIK/CountyDa… #agriculture #food
— CEDIK (@CEDIKentucky) March 22, 2013
Late Thursday, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service tweeted asking how data consumers were using its web soil survey data.
Are you an #OpenGov success story? Let us know how you're using our Web Soil Survey data -- we'd love to see! ow.ly/jimG9 #Gov20
— USDA NRCS (@USDA_NRCS) March 21, 2013
There aren’t any replies to that tweet yet, but that’s only one data point. If USDA continues to reach out to data consumers in similar ways it may begin to spot trends about which data are and aren't being used that can help it better spend its limited data transparency resources. That’s the kind of information you can only get by asking for it, though.
Joseph Marks
Joseph Marks covers government technology issues, social media, Gov 2.0 and global Internet freedom for Nextgov. He previously reported on federal litigation and legal policy for Law360 and on local, state and regional issues for two Midwestern newspapers. He also interned for Congressional Quarterly’s Homeland Security section and the Associated Press’s Jerusalem Bureau. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s in international affairs from Georgetown.
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