Kundra: One year later, developers ensure data.gov is more than data dump

In the year since the launch of data.gov, the site has grown from 47 data sets to over 250,000, said Federal CIO Vivek Kundra during a press briefing May 18.

"This is no small feat because it required agencies to fundamentally change the operating and move towards a presumption of openness," Kundra said.

Kundra said data.gov will see yet another increase in agency data in the coming year, but would not put a number on predicted data-set growth. "Part of what we're trying to do is make sure that we don't focus purely on the numbers moving forward. But we'll focus on the high-value data sets."

Some critics of data.gov have said the information is not thorough across agencies, comparing it to a pool a mile wide and an inch deep. Kundra says the open government directive addresses that problem. Not only does it push agencies to release high-value data sets, it makes sure they continue to release that data and implement new systems to facilitate it's release.

"[Something] that has been more difficult than we had expected," said Kundra. "Is the state of IT within federal agencies. Some of them were making data available in Excel spreadsheets, because that's how they do business. And that's challenging."

Kundra said the White House has used focus groups in the site's design in order to mimick features on popular consumer websites and make it usable for the "average person."

However, the average person is often not using data.gov. Rather, a growing community of developers and innovators who create applications around the data repository are using the site. Flyontime.us, obesity comparison tools across states and fixmycitydc.com are just some of the apps mentioned by data.gov.

"The way we define success with data.gov, for the end user, they won't even know it's powered by data.gov or that there's information coming from underneath from the data.gov platform. Where the average person is going to see value is when they're interacting with their government or when they're about to make a decision," said Kundra.

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